Microsoft is now in the process of turning off Manifest V2-based extensions in Edge, such as uBlock Origin. However, not everything is lost at this point.
1/2 A message stating that some extensions have been disabled because they are no longer supported has appeared after installing the latest Edge Canary build, but I THINK this is one of those unexpected changes coming from upstream Chromium:https://t.co/NME5AvLUvg pic.twitter.com/BLWPI5onYh
— Leopeva64 (@Leopeva64) February 24, 2025
Another thing worth noting is that the change does not appear to be affecting Edge's stable release or Beta/Dev Channels. For now, only Canary versions disable uBlock Origin and other MV2 extensions, leaving users a way to toggle them back on. Also, the uBlock Origin is still available in the Edge Add-ons store, which recently received a big update.
In August 2024, when Google started flagging uBlock Origin as unsupported, the extension's maker stepped in and recommended users switch to uBlock Origin Lite, a Manifest V3-based extension, and accept some of its limitations. Another option is to switch to Firefox. Mozilla recently announced its plans to keep Manifest V2 extensions working, including uBlock Origin, based on Mozilla Manifesto, which claims that "individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it."
Now, users can either switch to a browser that still supports MV2 extensions or move to MV3-based ad blockers. Of course, not all MV2 extensions have "more modern" versions, so for many, switching to Firefox or another browser with MV2 support will be the only option to keep old extensions working.
As an online publication, Neowin relies on ads for operating costs. We'd appreciate being whitelisted if you use an ad blocker. In addition, we have an ad-free subscription for $28 a year, which is another way to show support!
Seems like Microsoft is just taking whatever Chromium releases and repackages it to show more ads and to make Bing the default search engine. In this case, it's just dropping support for Manifest V2 extensions, such as uBlock Origin, and moving to Manifest V3, which does not support extensions intercepting and blocking requests using blockingWebRequest.
Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you're at it, note that "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox". [2]
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-manifes...
[2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Meanwhile FireFox just removed their commitment to not sell user data. Its their “Don’t be evil” moment
https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-...
I think that quoting Anthill in the osnews comment this part was left out: It would be only fair to include the part that was added to the FAQ too: > It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)
Independent FOSS forks of firefox without Mozilla services / tracking exist
They are not prepared to maintain a fork of Firefox: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues/2252#issuecomme...
I feel that if Firefox up and died we would have people scrambling to work on something like this in much greater numbers.
Does it matter? AFAIK Firefox doesn't plan to go closed-source, so applying patches should be continue being fine too.
It depends on how much Firefox enshittifies. If it's just about removing some telemetry configuration from upstream, then a couple of downstream patches will still do the job. If, say, Firefox decides to fully embrace the spyware business model and drop support for Manifest V2 in order to kill adblockers, then LibreWolf will probably have to maintain their own fat piece of logic built on top of Firefox. Keeping it as a soft fork would then be a lot of work (you'd basically have a patchset of tens of thousands LoC to keep porting through different versions of Firefox). And making it a hard fork would be even more work (it basically means that the LibreWolf folks are on their own and they have to maintain their own independent browser).
Maybe a hard fork would be more manageable if the scope was reduced to just web browsing instead of trying to be an app platform.
If librewolf is not a fork, then what is it?
I think their point is that they build on top of Firefox. If Firefox died tomorrow, Librewolf would die with it.
It’s a downstream patch.
Changes are recorded, then applied to the latest upstream version (Firefox) then packaged and sent as an update (LibreWolf)
In other words, a fork?
Or how does the semantics of patch/changes/update differ in any way from maintaining a fork? The packaging has nothing to do with this. It may not be a well-maintained fork, the maintainers might not see themselves capable of adding features and bugfixes on their own, but a fork is a fork.
I think the distinction is a soft fork or a hard fork. A soft fork is just a patchset over upstream and some people do not call it a fork. Hard fork mean that you are diverging from upstream, you do not longer follow upstream and you are fully separate from the upstream
I think fork implies following upstream. If you don't follow, then it's a divorce, not a fork.
No, "fork" means development has separated paths from original project. Changing some relatively minor parts but otherwise keeping close to upstream would be better called a "spin", especially when most of the changes are just to the default configuration.
It's a shame that GitHub messed up this term by calling any clone of a repository a "fork".
Your definition of fork excludes many notable forks. I never heard someone call a software project a divorce.
> Nope. Never have, never will.
Promissory estoppel maybe? Stronger case for it if you ever paid them for anything after this promise.
Given most EULAs contain standard tech boilerplate that paraphrases to "We can change anything about this agreement at any time without warning or notice to you", I doubt it.
It's really hard to take someone seriously when they say things like this:
> For years I’ve been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn’t happen, that I was crazy.
The removal of that language is important but this person is trying to make it about themselves.
I can understand them being frustrated
Arc is a Chromium web browser that also includes uBlock Origin in the default install.
Orion is a WebKit web browser from the folks at Kagi that supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions (including on iPhones and iPads) and has zero telemetry, and I have the Firefox version of uBlock Origin installed.
Firefox is not the only option for people that want alternatives to Chrome that support uBlock Origin.
Orion cannot support uBlock Origin completely either. I know that Orion allows the extension to be installed (I have done it too), but it only has partial support.
Quoting from a reply in a discussion on the Orion Feedback site from a few months ago (November 2024):
> " uBO is not supported on iOS due to Apple limitations."
[1]: https://orionfeedback.org/d/9145-ublock-origin-not-existent-...
Is the partial support only on iOS? Because iOS is a rather special case. Personally I don't count iOS versions of browsers as even being the same software.
As far as I can tell, Ublock Origin in Orion on iOS is way better than any other Adblock extension for Safari
When the platform itself limits the browsers then it's more a platform discussion than about what each of the browsers do on the platform.
The problem with support on iOS is that each browser is forced to be a skin for Safari and Safari only supports Safari Web Extensions, which are MV3-like, hence the platform limitation. The EU law may allow a browser to release in that region but Apple placed such heavy requirements and restrictions to do so none have actually been approved. I haven't seen a clear answer if less limited extension access itself would result in not being approved by Apple.
Browser vendors are somewhat responsible for this confusion by pretending to have a version of their browser for iOS. If they were honest with their app names instead of lying for marketing points then the blame would go to Apple where it belongs.
I am using Orion on iOS with uBO for two years and UBO works well enough for me. There is the odd website that won’t load in Orion so I switch to Safari, which I never use, and the amount of ads that are presented in Safari reassures me that uBO in Orion is working.
I've just tested it and while the ubo extension can be installed, it does not work at all.
I use brave browser and nextdns to block ads on ios now.
The ubo extension does work in orion, but I remember having to go somewhere deep into settings to make it actually be enabled. I don't remember exactly how I did it but eventually after a few restarts of the browser I got it working.
I did compare against other adblock systems on ios and found it to be the best option, as other adblocks either gave broken webpages or just didn't work at all.
I have tried UBO on Orion on iOS and it does not work. It is definitely installed. It definitely thinks that it's working. But the moment you switch the default Orion blocker off - the ads appear. And uBO just says "Blocked on this page 0", no matter the page. If you actually did manage to get it to work - that would be golden, would really appreciate it if you shared how you made it work.
To be quite frank - I haven't manage to get _any_ of the extensions (that I would like to have) to work in Orion. They all just silently fail in different ways.
Are you sure you're not just using Orion's built-in content blocker? I realized I had the uBO extension installed on iOS but it wasn't doing anything because I also had Orion's ad blocking enabled.
> the amount of ads that are presented in Safari
First, consider NextDNS to DNS adblock all your apps.
For in the browser, for those who do use Safari, consider 1Blocker, otherwise consider AdGuard Pro.
Sounds like Orion will do the job on macOS though, so that's at least one platform with an alternative. :)
Whose idea was it to take over the whole screen and play sound when you start Arc for the first time? It also showed a signup screen.
I removed it right away. I just want a browser, not whatever that was.
I was using Arc as my main browser until they added the mandatory account requirement. It came around the same time they moved iCloud syncing to their own backend.
Now I just use Safari because all I do really is read stuff.
Arc is a very... Appley browser. Its marketing and communication pretends it's a world-changing product of massive importance, something everyone desires to own. In reality, it's a fork of someone else's browser with some UX tweaks.
I looked into it, but couldn't get over the pretentiousness. They seem to make plenty of money from either investors or customers because they're not bankrupt yet, so I guess there must be a demographic that likes being treated like that.
There's something funny about a browser pretending it's the best thing since sliced bread telling me to drag the downloaded application to the macOS dock after downloading the Windows setup file.
I use Arc for work. It has a few nice UX enhancements. None of those things that you mentioned affect me on a day to day basis. (Honestly, I don’t pay attention to marketing when making my decisions.)
Pretentious or not, Arc is pre-enshittification. Chrome, Edge and FF are not, which is what matters.
Huh? Chrome was shit since launch. Maybe it was rising, but it's still much deeper in shit than ff.
Chrome at launch was an extremely minimal web browser (hence the name, Chrome referred to the barest amount of window chrome around the web content) with decent system integration and essentially no Google service integration other than setting Google as the default search engine (maybe the only one, I don’t remember if there was even a setting to change it). There wasn’t a Mac version at first, but when that came, it has Keychain integration too rather than its own password manager.
It was fast. At some point it had its own install of Adobe Flash so you could get rid of your regular Flash install and run two browsers: one without Flash as your main, and use Chrome for those few websites that require Flash effectively isolating them from your regular web experience, until this eventually became moot, it was another WebKit browser, albeit with V8 instead of JavaScriptCore, and pioneered per tab process isolation so rather than your whole browser crashing, just that one tab would. Prior to Chrome, whole browser crashes were not uncommon, oftentimes because of Flash (giving another reason to want to isolate it, although plug-ins I think were also isolated).
What Chrome subsequently became is the very definition of enshittification, and you can pinpoint it to around the time Google started trying to force people to link their Chrome profiles to their Google Accounts.
"The Browser Company" does not want to be seen as a dumb pipe. You are not downloading a mere browser, but a "platform" for "experiencing the web as never before".
They have to make money somehow I guess.
Obviously Google has many income streams. Mozilla does not.
It always comes down to the question: do you want to pay money for a browser? And the answer for 99% of the users is "hell no".
...and US tech companies take that as a reason to fill the app with feature bloat and then charge a subscription for it. Arc as a product is dead because the founders are of course pivoting to an "AI browser".
"It's not shit, it's experience" kind of corporate bs repacked?
If it's chromium based, they will need to remove manifest v2 at some point to stay close to the upstream version.
Possibly in Arc, although Brave also continues to support Manifest v2 so it’s possible it will continue to persist in some subset of Chromium-based browsers and as I said, it ships with the browser and is installed by default; but Orion is not Chromium-based.
Brave supports it right now, which is 2 months after it's been removed upstream.
I strongly suspect they're gonna drop support as soon as the first bigger merge issue happens along with a heartfelt blog that "they did they everything to support it, but it was just too much for the resources available to them"
I doubt it's gonna take more then 1-2 years (December 2027) for this to happen, but we will see.
Chrome officially supports Manifest V2 extensions until at least June 2025, hidden behind an enterprise flag: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
I expect Brave to easily support it until then and then drop it very quickly as you described.
You know, Google's really playing with fire here. There are enough browser companies running Chrome underneath, to more than equal Google's commitment.
That is, if those companies choose.
If even 80% of them wanted to fork? Not a biggie. And they could still cherry pick commits from the alt fork.
I think you might be underestimating the scope of work that happens on chromium a tad, from Github's "pulse" feature:
"Excluding merges, 684 authors have pushed 3,139 commits to main and 3,866 commits to all branches. On main, 14,924 files have changed and there have been 740,516 additions and 172,682 deletions."
That's stats from last week. Last year Google apparently was responsible for about 95% of contributions. Other than Microsoft (which has the same bad incentives as Google) none of the alt-chromium browser companies has like, 5% of the engineers to maintain a real alternative
Yes, but as I said they can merge in changes. Apparently more than I thought, but still, they can.
Opera has pinch-zoom text-reflow in a chromium backend, and that seems to be substantial, and yet it is (on purpose) kept out of mainline chrome. So they do loads of tracking/merging too.
The scope of work to do a few small features on top of chrome wouldn't be a biggie, compared to the entire project.
How hard would it be to "wrap" the browser in a ublock like shell, so that all network requests are filtered through a firewall before they even reach the chrome application layer.
It might be easier to maintain than an actual extension interface with hooks thought the code.
I don't think you'd need manifest V2 for such a rudimenty logic.
The reason why ublock origin is so powerful is because it works with the DOM/not at the network level and can use heuristics to determine wherever something is a advertisement or not.
I imaged you would use both.
Brave supports uBO blocklists OOTB, no extension needed.
So even when they have to say farewell to Manifest v2 it really doesn't matter, at least in case of privacy (and for some medical) protection.
In addition, since their adblocker isn't an extension and doesn't care about extension APIs, they can do things even Manifest v2 Chrome extensions can't. For example, full-fat uBO can't do CNAME uncloaking on Chromium due to API limitations, but can do it on Firefox which has the APIs. Brave is Chromium-based, but since Shields isn't an extension they've built CNAME uncloaking into it.
This is good info to keep in my back pocket. Thanks!
As does Vivaldi
This is arguably the most compelling reason for people to switch to Brave. If there are smart people over there, they'll make a concerted effort to keep Manifest v2 in their fork.
I don't understand or know alot about extensions, but what is so incredibly impossible about adding new capabilities to manifestv3? It's a manifest describing what the addon wants to do and some UX to allow it right?
It’s not really about the manifest. It’s about the APIs available to extension programmers. Chrome has made the "webRequestBlocking" API unavailable and that’s what’s affecting adblockers. Chrome will eventually remove the code supporting this API, and it is not feasible for downstream to make it available anyway.
Why can’t forks just maintain an independent implementation afterwards?
They could, theoretically. But just imagine what that actually means. Unless you cease merging upstream/the project you've forked, you'll have to resolve all conflicts caused by this divergence.
And that's a lot of work for a multi million LOC project, unless the architecture is specifically made to support such extensions... which isn't the case here.
And freezing your merges indefinitely isn't really viable either for a browser
A quick look at the code gives me the impression that webRequestBlocking is a fairly trivial modification to webRequest, and they seem to be keeping the latter. This leads me to two conclusions: it wouldn't be terribly hard for a fork maintainer to keep webRequestBlocking, and Google's technical excuses for removing it are disingenuous.
> ... and Google's technical excuses for removing it are disingenuous.
That's been the default assumption of pretty much everyone anyway.
That may be true now but will it still be true when Google next refactors their request code under the assumption that no requirements for a webRequestBlocking API exist.
So go make an LLM manage the fork or something. Everyone keeps telling me they are amazing at code these days. Surely it can do a task like that if that's all it's doing all day.
If not today maybe soon...
Because these aren't really independent browsers but reskins.
Being independent of google requires actually doing the work and not just copying google.
The codebase is huge, sure, but the particular feature is relatively small and (as I assume and as verified by another poster) quite easy to implement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43204603
I think if a bunch of Chromium forks come together, they can maintain v2 support for quite a while. A fork maintained by a combination of Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and maybe some of those startup-based browsers can probably keep the most important APIs running for quite some time.
At some point the issues will become too difficult to fix, but none of these companies need to be doing it alone. Adding a separate upstream with some "fuck off Google" fixes for them to base their proprietary browser on seems like a smart thing to do.
Especially since Firefox's new leadership has been encroaching on a lot of the value Firefox provides people (e.g removing the pledge to not sell data?!?).
What about Brave? I eas avoiding it for a long time for no reason while chrome was getting continually worse.
Maybe it's time
I would really like people to stop recommending Brave :(
It may be an okay-ish browser, but the company behind it _repeatedly_ does shady things (installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc), I am honestly not sure why people are OK with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
Brave is still the best browser on the market. Trying creative things for monetization (and failing loudly) is a million times better than anything else that any other browser is doing -- including Firefox.
If you don't want the Web3 crap you can turn it off -- as I have done for years now. But someone please help me understand how a browser that takes in half a billion dollars from Google annually to function as controlled opposition in case of an antitrust case is somehow OK to recommend, but a browser that is independent is somehow bad because of bad business decisions made years ago.
Brave is organizationally independent, sure. But it also relies on Chromium, and so isn't independent from the Chromium code base.
Firefox is at least any kind of opposition.
I would also add the dead simple point that Brave is yet another Chromium-derived browser. If someone likes Brave just because they like it then, sure, whatever.
But it doesn't belong in a conversation about browser diversification away from Chromium. I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads
> I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads
At the end of the day, it’s not Google Chrome. I’ve mentioned in other comments that Brave isn’t my top 1, 2 or 3 choice, so I won’t rehash that here, but I think it absolutely belongs in a conversation as an alternative for people that want to get away from Google Chrome. The basic skeleton that composes Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers mostly isn’t the issue, because Chrome is and always has been technically excellent. It’s all the other crap Google started grafting on top of it that is, on top of their stance (backed up by many many web developers here) that the standards and web technologies that Google supports should be the standards and web technologies that all browsers support and prioritize.
Brave is better than Chromium in the same way that a sore throat is better than strep throat, when what everyone really wants is a vaccine.
All the arguments in favor of Brave over Chrome are going to apply tenfold to browsers fully independent of Chromium, and it's a perilous place to be, a boat on the edge of the Chromium whirlpool forever rowing (Brave repeatedly branching and forking the parts of Chromium it doesn't want and reconciling them to new updates) to not get sucked in.
I wouldn’t put it in as strong a terms but directionally, I think we agree that Brave isn’t the strongest possible alternative to Google Chrome. I don’t think it is invalid to include it in a conversation about alternative browsers to Google Chrome that aren’t Firefox, nor is the use of Chromium sufficient criteria to disqualify alternatives.
That said, I do have a general preference for browsers that aren’t Chromium-based as well.
It’s so frustrating to me that the Brave boosters can’t seem to fathom that I don’t want a “better ad experience.” I want a /”no-ad experience.”/
That's what a lot of us have. Brave's own ad systems are opt-in, and a majority of users don't opt-in. It's a minority that are interested in the crypto features. I just left the crypto stuff off, hid the icons and have a degoogled Chromium with strong adblock and some nice quality of life extras.
It's equally frustrating to me that some people don't seem to realize that you can opt-out (once, at initial setup) and have a completely ad-free experience.
It's the same kind of iterative creep of compromises on privacy that initially raised alarms with Mozilla, which culminated in Mozilla's "don't be evil" moment (or, their, erm, not-"don't be evil" moment).
You can opt out now while they are trying to gain market share. Honestly everyone on here should know this game by now. There is no such thing as "free" product made by a for-profit corporation.
I stopped using Brave a couple of years ago when I switched to Arc and I have since switched from Arc to Orion. I didn’t have any issues with at the time even though it was not my default; it made a nice enough fallback Chromium-based browser for the very few times that mattered. I just turned off all the crypto-crap, and regular reviews of the settings didn’t reveal them to be turning on anything I already disabled.
If Brave works for you, go for it.
It's time. People can complain that "oh it's based on Chromium" but I don't think that's the hill to die on right now.
What makes Brave a better choice than Firefox? While it claims to be privacy-focused, it's developed by a VC-funded company, not a non-profit foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
Brave sells ads and discloses aggregate-level data to advertisers, and has a history of trust-undermining transgressions mentioned upthread:
>installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc
Does Mozilla sell your data, or did they remove language saying they won't?
Do you really think Brave won't, when it comes time to pay the piper?
Site isolation is one: Firefox doesn't sandbox websites from each other on non-Windows platforms, and even on Windows its sandboxing solution is just worse than Chromium's. They're doing work on implementing sandboxing more widely, mind, but still have a long road ahead of them to get to parity.
Firefox has had site isolation since 2021: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/05/18/introducing-sit...
Yes, on desktop. Mobile Firefox still has none, though that should change within this year or the next.
I would think the logic runs exactly the opposite way. Browser diversification would make not using chromium the good thing, rather than not using gecko.
What's wrong with Gecko?
I think many people's issue with Brave is that it's a cryptocurrency grift, not that it's a Chromium reskin.
Don't most Brave users have all the crypto functionality turned off or opted out?
Please use Firefox instead of a Chromium derivative. We need variety in the browser space and Gecko is pretty much the only independent option remaining.
No.
Firefox is still my primary work browser because all the anti-tracking stuff Orion does actually breaks some sites I depend on (well, makes them harder to use anyway), but Orion has become my main and I have lost confidence in Mozilla.
If you want to continue using Firefox as a kind of service to the world or weird self-imposed civic duty, that’s on you. I can pay for Orion and know that there is a company with an actual business model behind it and also not worry about misaligned incentives, or fixing all the tracking and telemetry defaults (only to watch my hard work crumble like when a random Firefox update hosed my settings on my personal machine a couple years ago) because there is no telemetry.
Idk I switched about a year and a half ago from Chrome and aside from Firefox still being slower I haven’t had any issues. All the websites I visit and the features I use like Nvidia video upscaling work fine. Ublock Origin works fine which is really the most important thing. I’ll eat my hat if any Chromium derivative is still supporting MV2 in 2030.
I keep having to correct people up and down this thread.
Orion is not a Chromium derivative.
Further, nobody here said Firefox was incapable as a browser. Use it if you like it, but having used Firefox off and on since 2005, I’ve written it off on my personal machines.
It's a Safari derivative (WebKit). You're still giving market share for an engine owned by a large corporation.
Using WebKit doesn’t make something a Safari derivative. There are many WebKit browsers out there, Chrome used to be one them.
John Gruber had the Kagi CEO—Vlad Prelovac—on in December. I yoinked this from the auto-generated transcript in Apple’s Podcasts app:
> Orion is still in beta. We are nearing V1. There was so much to do.
> One thing that differentiates building on top of WebKit to Blink is that for Blink, there is Chromium, which is the web browser app framework. You get the entire browser out of the box. You can just change the name.
> And you have a browser for WebKit. There is no Chromium equivalent. You have to create every menu, every button, everything, which is why it took us six years to get where we are.
> It's basically written from scratch. And on top of that, we also decide to port web extensions, to port API to natively to WebKit. We're doing all these hard things that take a lot of time.
> And I know many people [aren’t] happy to see Orion is buggy. This extension doesn't work. Well, yes, it takes time to do this properly, but we are determined to do that properly.
> And of course, it also has the native ad blocker included and all these good things that a browser should have. But for various reasons, all the mainstream browsers cannot do. And yeah, that's the origin story for Orion.
Notably they have been porting in support for Web Extensions APIs that even Safari doesn’t support. You can see a full breakdown comparing Orion (Mac) and Orion (iOS) vs other popular browsers here: https://kagi.com/orion/WebExtensions-API-Support.html
That ship has sailed. There are websites I depend on that can't use Firefox because it doesn't work with Firefox no, those websites are not going to update themselves for something that is used by 0.1% of the web.
And now Firefox has shad the bed so badly with their "we will actually sell your data now" that I don't even care. It can burn in hell.
In what way do you "depend" on those websites? I.e. what would be the "cost" to you of not being able to use them? More than a small inconvenience?
Why? Variety for variety’s sake is just inefficiency. There are plenty of Chromium forks that work just fine.
FF’s legalese may have burned through their last bit of good will, and if that’s the last nail in their coffin let it be a lesson in terminal enshitification and not understanding or caring about your users.
>Why? Variety for variety’s sake is just inefficiency.
It's more than that. It prevents monopolization of the web by a single company. This isn't like picking a different version of Ms. Dash from the grocery store.
Maybe I’m a bit slow and I’m not following. Why does using chromium give Google a monopoly? One might argue the opposite: that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes, because a large critical mass can simply fork it.
It gives Google unparalleled power to influence web standards, effectively giving other browsers no choice but to adopt their preferred implementations.
They can push technologies that benefit their ads business (e.g. manifest 3 breaking ublock origin). And the notion "embrace extend extinguish" was practically invented for circumstances like this, of engaging the development community in a particular field of software, dominating it, and achieving leverage to change the way the web works.
>that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes
Google controls commits to Chromium, and it does that with an invite only developer pool almost entirely of people associated with Google. The stakeholders don't have a proportionate hand in the destiny of Chromium. I think you're right that it's maybe better, in the sense that we could imagine something even worse, but that's loo low a benchmark to offer comfort that Chromium is having a net-positive impact on balance of power in terms of who can help you access the web.
Arc is a Chromium browser that has been kneecapped to explicitly not work on Linux. No thanks!
Arc is in maintenance mode as The Browser Company focuses on building a new browser: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24279020/browser-company...
Lost all trust for a lot of users after they did this.
Zen browser would be an almost drop-in replacement for those that like Arc but it uses FF under the hood instead.
Yeah, I saw their YouTube video which was immensely annoying to watch. That’s why I was pretty pleased when I discovered Orion and I recently switched from Arc and MobileSafari to Orion as my defaults, but I’m using Arc as the Chromium browser I keep around for when that matters (which right now just means DRM streaming sites like Netflix and Crunchyroll), but Brave could fill this spot just as easily.
Arc and Orion are both closed source.
Also Brave.. just not sure when or if someone will breaking fork chromium.
I wish they released an android version, much easily ported to debian &| windows.
Although, if kagi fails, it probably won't matter.
On an HN thread a couple weeks back, the Kagi team mentioned they just started working on a Linux version of Orion.
No idea what they plan to do about syncing though since right now they just use iCloud syncing, but it’s a start.
It's quite relevant to highlight that Mozilla is removing the promise that they won't sell your data: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Another browser option is Brave, but you have to disable the altcoins stuff :/
Full context, from the link you provided: ""Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love."
I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
What "sale of data" falls under a legal definition but would be understood by everyone to not be selling data? An example?
It sounds more like 'we sell your data, but we do it in a legally protracted way so we could claim up to now that we don't'.
Given this relates to Firefox's central selling proposition, they surely have an essay detailing exactly what data they're selling?
I would expect that the default search engine deals that Firefox mostly relies on for financing could be interpreted as such.
Mozilla gets money, and as a result of the deal, the searches (data) of anyone who didn't change the default go to the company running the default search engine.
>What "sale of data" falls under a legal definition but would be understood by everyone to not be selling data? An example?
I assume probably data that's anonymized (in some sense) and/or aggregated (in some sense). But there's so much grey area there that it's a lot less reassuring than a straight up blanket statement that they used to be able to make.
The real problem is that they are collecting too much data in the first place. Really, the company making the browser should receive no data at all - even auto-update servers can be handled by other non-profit organizations like universities.
It is always the same idea - if the data is even slightly touched and/or processed, it is suddenly not a personal data anymore and is "ok" to be sold.
Even fuller context:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)."
How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
> We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be.
Normally when you say "as close to X as legally possible", that means you want to do X fully, but you can't because the law forbids you to. X in this case is "not selling data". But "not selling data" is not illegal at all. What are they even trying to say here?
(Also I don't find that sentence on their FAQ page)
I think the key is the "about you" part, not the "selling data" part. Based on the rest of the statement, your personal information (name, age, location, personal files (uploads/downloads), that kind of data) isn't shared, which is what most people would think of when they hear "your data". It sounds like the information they do share may be associated with you, but isn't about you in the colloquial sense - even if it is about you in the legal sense.
>I think the key is the "about you" part, not the "selling data" part
They're certainly attempting to articulate that as a conceptual distinction, but I don't think that division is as real as would be implied by trying to separate the one thing into two different words. Aggregated data is "about you" too, in many of the senses that matter in the context of privacy, and I would reject attempts at conceptualizing this into two things to imply otherwise.
I agree that this is a huge breath of fresh air because you are (1) actually reading what Mozilla said and (2) making sober nuanced distinctions absent from most criticisms.
But that said, these reassurances run into a "who ordered that" problem. No advocate for privacy was ever advocating on behalf of anonymized data any more than personally identifying data. Anonymous averaging over interests of groups still involves privacy compromises; and metrics, fingerprints and learning algorithms can mix and match that in ways that still cross the line. Abstracted profiling still works, and digs deeper than you might suspect (I recall the netflix data that could predict interests across different categories, like people watching House of Cards also liking It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Preferences can hang together in a measurable way, which is exactly why ad companies want them.
It's also just part of the long slow, death by one thousand cuts transformation into a company that doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy.
> How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
This situation isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is particularly weasely or disingenuous. It's not black & white and there are meaningful differences here.
I think the assumption of 'selling data' and primary concern from most users is the sale of their identifiable personal data - i.e. telling advertisers "this user is interested in X", using their privileged position as a browser to track and collect that information. This is absolutely what Facebook is doing when they sell your data, for example.
The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still committed to never doing that or anything similar. That is the main thing I'd want to know, so that's great.
However, it sounds like they may be selling generic anonymous data in some way - for example telling Pocket what percentage of people use the Pocket extension, or telling Google what percentage of people change their search engine away from Google. Both of those are cases where you can imagine they might receive significant extra income from partners given that data, and they feel this is reasonable but means they can technically no longer say the 'never sell your data'.
You could consider that level of data sharing problematic of course. That said, there is spectrum of problems here, and personally (and I think for most people) I am much more concerned about the tracking & distribution of actual personal identifiable data than I am about generic metrics like those, if that is what's happening (unfortunately, they haven't explained much further so this is still somewhat speculation - I fully agree more precise language would be very helpful).
>The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still committed to never doing that or anything similar.
This runs into what I'm calling the "who ordered that" problem, because this represents a retreat from a stronger commitment to privacy, and is not a conception of privacy that anyone was asking for, or that satisfies anyone who is concerned about privacy.
I don't want my interest in sci-fi to be made to conflict with my preference from buying locally, and influence campaigns urging me buy books through Preferred LArge Retailer and pushing me toward that clash are a problem whether the data powering them is personal or fed into an abstracted anonymized group.
And depersonalized profiling that "knows" I can be sorted into a specific "type of guy" bucket may involve learning things about me that I don't want to be inputs into marketing. They can still, for instance, make inroads into judgements about things like self esteem (e.g. colognes and beauty products), financial precarity, and can work to socialize groups into consumerist self-conceptions. They probably can be used to make inroads into classic forms of privacy violations like "looking to buy a home" or "trying to get pregnant" or other such aspects of identity that I don't want marketing to touch.
The problem is that ‘anonymized data’ is quite a big spectrum, and may be able to be deanonymized quite easily.
See this submission from earlier this month: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads (26 days ago, 1957 points) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909921
Mozilla owns Pocket.
> I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
It's actually super simple and needs no obfuscation or verbal esoterica. Don't engage in a contract where data Firefox has collected from users is transferred to a third party.
Done. Easy as.
The sister comment on search engine data transfer is FUD -- the browser can of course send queries to a default search engine without needing to pipe any information to Firefox. Firefox would need no usage monitoring whatsoever, just do a firm fixed price contract and the details are settled.
Still makes it sound like they want to profit from user data.
I also thought Brave is the browser with the annoying token. But I still haven't seen anything about BAT but happily using brave for a while now.
There's also Zen, which is Firefox based.
No you don't, it's opt in.
Turn off bat - no issues. I installed brave from a portable version and update the parts - found thru trial and error - as required, from the latest downloads
They falsely advertised that creators who didn't opt in (or even knew about this) could be supported by donating BAT, and then kept it once it remained unclaimed.
BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content. It's about as close to stealing as you can get in the ad business, aside from the Honey affiliate highjacking.
I don't think they kept any BAT in that situation.
The BAT was Brave's to begin with as far as I know, part of a pool to promote the launch of their tipping system. It makes perfect sense to return the BAT users could assign from the pool to creators back to the pool if the creators didn't sign up.
Which is not to say that the tipping UI wasn't a hot mess, which it was. Hard to tell who was onboard, who wasn't and eg. Tom Scott got a bunch of tips when he had no interest in the platform whatsoever.
> BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content.
It doesn't. The browser literally shows you toaster popups all by itself, and gives you some pocket change amounts of BAT for viewing them.
mad-max-tom-hardy-nuh-uh-thats-bait.webm
The end of extensions like uBlock Origin will mark the end of power user era in web development history.
> Users should never had the power to block what we did in the first place.
-- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-targeting better for their customers.
I think power users are the type of users who can be bothered to install a browser that supports the features that they want (and doesn't implement the misfeatures that they don't want) ;)
You may have heard G. Michael Hopf's famous quote: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
I think we may be advancing to another step in that cycle with software development. Strong, principled software companies created good times in the late 2000s and 2010s, now good times have created software company leaders who are less principled, and the hard times are beginning. And eventually, after the hard times have gone on for long enough, principled leaders will hopefully emerge and create good times again.
That being said:
- I really admire the thinking and moral aptitude that resulted in the Oxide Principles page[0]. Oxide and 37signals[1] are two examples of very principled companies that are keeping good times rolling in their respective fields, and both of them do a ton to support open source software.
- And, there is nothing like ad revenue to accelerate corruption of good principles in software companies that handle user data -- to the extent that I wonder if it's in the same moral category as government officials accepting bribes.
The trouble is, it's hard to say how long the "bad times" arc will last.
Exogenous factors! <https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/strong-3>
This requires a proper alternative to continue to exist. Firefox users already have to make a lot of concessions(i know, i'm one of them). With how Mozilla management is running, we're at risk of the only real alternative being mismanaged into oblivion.
I am cautiously optimistic for ladybird. But itll take quite a bit longer to become viable, sadly.
I hope they change the name of the browser at some point, it sounds vaguely promiscuous (maybe because "ladyboy" is the closest word to it). One reason Chrome started taking off in popularity is because tech enthusiasts appreciated its speed and made their friends/relatives download it. Harder to imagine telling my parents to download something called "Ladybird"...
What do you call small beetles which eat aphids?[1]
I don't share GP's word association but a possible answer to your question is in your own URL: Coccinella.
Yes, but there seems to be a growing hiatus between the tools used by power users and normal ones. Fifteen years ago everyone had a PC with Firefox, now this browser has a marginal market share, and even personal computers are starting to be a second-class platform, the focus being phones. And products used by a minority tend to be less supported – as shown by the increasing number of sites that don't support Firefox.
Until sites block them completely, which will be easier with attestation
It's already been trivial. There's a few sites showing you a special message or denying access if you block ads. uBlock doesn't really help here that much and if they tried, the issue is very asymmetric - it's much easier to update the site than to patch it again.
So far, most of these sites that try to exclude adblocker users don't detect uBO on Firefox.
Most anti-adblock also fails on Brave. Those that don't can generally be sidestepped with literally two clicks to disable scripts. The remaining few require substantially more tweaking (generally disabling a specific script while allowing others to run) which is outside the domain of most people, but still viable.
Marketshare. People don't care that much.
Many users don't notice any difference after switching to a Manifest v3 ad blocker. I'll reserve judgment until it actually happens.
What you said is true: I indeed cannot tell the difference between a v2 and v3 ad blocker. But that doesn't change OP's perspective that a v2 ad blocker is a symbol of the power user era. Power users often want customizability to an extreme level. Normal users who block ads simply install the extension and be done with it: they don't write custom rules or adjust the filters.
Not at first perhaps but they will notice when ad networks shift to take advantage of techniques that can no longer be blocked in Chrome.
I run multiple brands of browsers including firefox, but all of them use ublock origin. The day chrome hard bans it will be the day I uninstall it.
This isn't the end of uBlock Origin. Just the end of it on Chromium-based browsers.
If you are a power-user you may well benefit from using Firefox where uBlock Origin has always claimed to work best.
By switching you will also be removing power from an ad-funded near-monopoly that feels (correctly) that they can do whatever they want even if it is universally despised by users because the other choices are quickly going away. Every using using another browser weakens that grip, every user using a Chromium derivative allows them to keep trying to wedge new features that no other browser wants to implement for user privacy reasons and creates website incompatibility.
That's exactly what Edge is. It reminds me of the mobile operator branded versions of feature- and early smartphones: Same core functionality, more intrusive ads, delayed feature updates.
Vivaldi is a chromium browser with a built-in ad blocker that doesn’t require extensions at all.
MV3 is non-negotiable. The second its dropped in Arc I am jumping ship... somewhere. Firefox isn't appealing, Zen isn't fleshed out, Orion is coming along nicely but isn't done yet. But above all else I need MV3. Very sad Vivaldi won't be supporting it, before I was an Arc user I used Vivaldi and I quite liked it
As mentioned in the parallel thread Orion does not support v2 and uBlock Origin does not work there. The commenter mistook Orion's internal adblocker for uBlock functioning.
I've been looking at Floorp and Zen, maybe add those to your list to check out
Indeed, Ive used firefox (since 2004) with uBlock (since 2015 or so) and have mac Mini(s) connected to TVs; use wireless mouse to enjoy the web from my couch or in my room. There are zero ads or popups seen.
On other TVs like my Roku i do pay for a few streaming services with ads and get bombarded with ads on that tv. But its a group tv that many use.
That is sad. I need multiple profiles for my work and I cannot use Firefox because the profile support is awful. Creating and managing profiles as well as switching profiles is so intuitive in Chrome, it just works. In Firefox it's extremely user hostile. Hearing that Microsoft will also remove uBlock from Edge makes me angry, because that will make my work-life so much more annoying.
Better profile support is coming soon, already in Nightly.
Edit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-out-firefox-p...
I assume this means they've added AI to better tie together the profile you use for work and the one you use for sh*t posting.
Working title: Copilot for Tracking.
Are containers not good enough to replace profiles for your use case? I've been juggling those like profiles and I'm very happy.
You should use "Multi account containers" instead of profiles in firefox. It's like profiles in chrome/edge but it works by tab instead.
It doesn't allow for different extensions though. I need to use a full profile in order to use separate bitwarden accounts, for example.
I created shortcuts in my taskbar for launching firefox with each of my profiles. It works pretty well.
I like that Orion (safari based, Mac only) shows different icons in the dock. All chrome profiles show up as a single icon. I haven't checked Firefox, I've got away with just installing separate types (default, ESR, nightly).
Only thing I can suggest is filing feedback. They don't have market share so they still listen, for now
> So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it).
Stand up against the browser hegemony*, choose WebKit with support for UBlock Origin:
---
* Tongue in cheek, of course. Long live Firefox.
Edge has two features I actually like:
- integrated screen shot, which includes a “full webpage” option that handles scrolling for you
- Split View, which lets you open two webpages side by side within a single tab
I use both of these daily and get a decent productivity boost from them.
It's funny because Firefox and Chrome both support full webpage screenshots natively, but they just bury it in their dev tools.
The screenshot feature is easily accessible in Firefox using the right-click context menu on any webpage
If Mozilla really is as shady about user data as some people think they've become, someone's about to be pretty confused about why they suddenly have hundreds of nearly-identical screenshots of this HN page on their servers
If you customize your toolbar you can also add a button for it there
TIL! Thanks!
All the major browsers can do the screenshot thing, most just keep it hidden in the dev tools for some reason while MS realized “hey, people who have no idea what html is might like taking screenshots too”.
I used to use edge quite a bit when I did a contract stint at a Fortune 500. My favorite feature was the vertical tabs. Working there I often has 20-30 tabs open and having them in a vertical list was super nice.
Never used it since because of data privacy concerns. But in the context of working for that company where the assumption was that I would have zero privacy it was fine
there are quite a few features like this. I actually did a comparison of chromium vs edge headers yesterday, it's a lot more than a rebrand. shame the source code is proprietary
https://github.com/pl4nty/msedge/commit/96aa52634072b12fa175...
[dead]
> So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice
Too bad a lot of websites just don't work with Firefox. It seems web devs are not testing with Firefox anymore.
Which ones? I’ve had exactly one problem with Firefox lately (one component didn’t work on LinkedIn).
Can you explain in detail what feature of UBlock Origin I will lose because of V3 vs V2 extensions?
I see people complaining, I don't see concrete examples, only panic
All of them. UBlock Origin does not work on V3. There was a Lite version that used V3 but they stopped work on it because it was so limited. It looks like there's been some updates to it recently now.
The size of blacklists has gone from unlimited to a limited size. The blocking ability has been limited. And the worst of all, blocklists have to be bundled in extension updates and not downloaded. While they have increased the limited blocklist size for V3 overtime, I don't know if they ever changed the other limits.
Here is the official FAQ: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... For some context, I currently have 393,405 network filters ＋ 385,476 cosmetic filters. "The current limit imposed by the various implementations is a guaranteed 30K. It is possible for an extension to use more rules, but anything above the global limit will not be enforced. Currently, the global limit in Chromium is 330K static rules."
Microsoft loves ad revenue as much as anyone, why would they argue it? They can just blame google, having their cake and eating it too.
[dead]
Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable. The result is one of the following two: migrate to Firefox, or the biggest web detox ever
Brave still works with ublock origin but every month or so they pull a windows and some new Brave feature I don’t want gets turned on or featured in some way.
I wonder how long they’ll maintain manifest v2 compatibility. Once they throw in the towel, Firefox will truly be the last stand.
I stopped trusting Brave after they launched a crypto token and started replacing affiliate codes in URLs.
that sounds as illegal as wiretapping
There seem to be a handful of anti-Bravers in this thread, and is it too much to hope they’d do 5 minutes of research? https://np.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/nw7et2/delete...
I mean, I initially installed it on mobile to get rid of the ads, and then eventually deleted it, after it started showing me ads on the main page. I also think that their whole original "ad replacement" scheme (https://archive.is/W0k4j) is complete BS and pretty telling.
But sure, let us do 5 minutes of research! So, this referral code injection was a mistake (that their CEO had to apologize for https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...)
Then there was the "donations for content creators" debacle, where they started gathering donations for various YouTubers, without.. actually talking to those YouTubers. But using their names and faces to promote the whole thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...
Apparently, the original idea was that you could "contribute to any website you visit. The idea was that once a site reached a threshold, the potential owner would be notified. They could then authenticate (prove ownership, etc) and claim the donations." (https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1e9i5ls/how_...), which is mind boggling to me that somebody actually thought it's a good idea.
Anyway, they had to apologize for it, after hearing "important feedback": https://brave.com/blog/rewards-update/
They have also installed VPNs onto users machines without asking: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-se... I don't think they apologized for that one... But they did revert the decision.
Then there's Brave News, Brave Wallet, Brave Rewards, which is just completely unnecessary bloat IMO. You _can_ turn some of it off, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth though.
A lot of "mistakes" and "oopsies" if you ask me
> I wonder how long they’ll maintain manifest v2 compatibility.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
They are going to keep it enabled until google removes the code from chromium in June. Then it sounds like they are going to try to use other means to offer "limited MV2 support" but there are some issues, including the fact that they don't have their own extension store (and presumably the chrome one won't allow mv2 extensions to be updated) so I'm not sure to what degree that will actually work.
Also maintaining a browser fork is not work to be taken lightly specially if it touches such core and security critical functionality like extensions.
What new features? I've been using it for years and it's been very steady, I've switched off their wallet and that's it.
Automatically inserting affiliate links into URLs when users visit certain e-commerce websites.
Integration of Web3 features, including cryptocurrency wallets and NFT support.
Inclusion of Brave News and sponsored images on the new tab page.
Addition of a VPN service within the browser.
Feels very scammy and grifty for a project that's supposedly about user privacy.
#1 existed for literally 24 hours and was clearly a stupid idea.
#2 opt-in only.
#3 agreed. annoying. can opt out.
#4 opt-in only.
#5 disagreed.
Broken trust, even if only 24h.
Has Brave advertised those opt-in features on first launch forcing a choice? Cause that is scammy if they did.
Not a Brave user but I have managed it at a workplace before. Far as I recall they show a wallet button at the top right near the extensions button and show crypto trading rates alongside the weather on the default new tab page. Disabling the wallet icon could be done with a right click and a left click, and the new tab page could be customized in settings to show less stuff pretty easily. Might be different now.
opt-in but afaik they still show up in places unless you disable them
> Automatically inserting affiliate links into URLs when users visit certain e-commerce websites.
Happened before I even started using it, and I've been using it for a long while now. Probably time to let this one go?
> Integration of Web3 features, including cryptocurrency wallets and NFT support.
That's not a new feature, it's been in there since I started using it, and it's off by default and then easily hidden. It didn't turn up one day turned on.
> Inclusion of Brave News and sponsored images on the new tab page.
Yeah I'll give you this one. I've turned this off... I mean they're developing free to use software, so I feel bad about it. I'd probably pay for Brave at this point, but I don't want to see ads ever. At least it's easy to turn off.
> Addition of a VPN service within the browser.
I think this one is fine? I used it once when I was staying at a hotel, it was easy to use, other than that it's just hidden.
It was always just a crypto grift.
1. Sleazy
2. Weird but not evil
3. 100% acceptable
4. Good, maybe. What vpn?
4. No, it is not good. "Brave appears to install VPN Services without user consent" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932754
Brave does not need ublock origin, and brave adblock is independent of manifest v2/3.
They implement compatible features in the browser itself.
Can you create your own filters, or subscribe to filter lists with Brave's ad blocker? If not then it's in no way a replacement for uBlock.
No fan of Brave here, but you can, yeah.
Are you sure? I just installed it on Android and can't find anything about lists in the settings.
Tried searching and I can't find anything about subscribing to lists on desktop either, only a few discussions about the default set of lists they use.
Assuming it's the same as on desktop, go to settings->shields->content filters. They have a bunch of default filter lists you can subscribe to or you can add your own. You can also create your own custom filter rules. You can also do it semi-automatically by right clicking (no idea the equivalent on mobile) on an element in a page and there will be a "Block Elements" option that does a pretty decent job of wildcard blocking the element group you selected, and can be configured pretty easily with the popup.
Oh it works! That's great, thank you.
Settings -> Brave Shields and privacy -> Content Filtering.
I'm gonna be honest with you, the giant orange un-hideable brave logo might be the biggest reason I don't use Brave. It's like I can feel it burning into my phone's OLED.
Lol, understandable.
I actually like kiwi browser quite a lot on mobile. Extensions, Devtools(!!!) make it especially great. Try that if you want (it's on top of chromium android).
I use brave most of the time though, because I use their sync service across all my devices.
With Brave you can enable manifest v2 ublock origin if you prefer anyway.
I never see ads with default Brave. I was under the impression that uBlock was obviated by Brave.
Have been using it for a long time. I am very happy with it.
The massive amount of online features Brave has (just have a look at all the toggles in settings) makes me wonder whether this has been exploited in the wild at all.
How long will Firefox take to fall? Until Google tells the lawyer who runs Mozilla that they'll stop sponsoring her if she doesn't fall in line?
Google make up a significant part of Mozilla's income, but Firefox development doesn't make up a similarly significant part of Mozilla's expenses. They could keep browser development going without issue even if Google ditches them.
Firefox has such a small slice of the browser market, that I doubt Google will bother.
You mean Google won't bother paying them anymore?
You don't think Google is spending all that money for nothing, do you?
It has long been argued that the reason Google pay to support Firefox (by being default browser) is to keep it around and so avoid being treated as a monopoly. That seems reasonable.
Though now a bribe to Trump/Musk should be enough so maybe they don't need FF anymore.
Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
As in, suppose your daily browsing generates about $3 of monthly ad revenue [0]. Instead, you have a (digital) wallet linked to your browser, which could be pre-loaded with credit each month. For each website you visit you may decide to opt-out of ads by paying a fraction of your credits.
You could even have a system where you could pay for a model with light-ads (i.e. at most 1 ad per page, 10 seconds of ads per 30min of video), or pay more for zero ads.
I understand it's a difficult system to organize and is dependent on a strong network. But I'd expect there to be a solid small market by now.
Lots of individual websites have this option (e.g. Netflix, newspapers, Spotify, Youtube Premium) but there's nothing overarching.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...
Why would I pay someone to stop sending me malware? I'm not going to pay random sites to not send crypto miners or not auto download and execute a virus. I expect my computer to protect me from those things.
For more general pay-to-browse, it needs to have the friction of the user deciding to pay, or you still incentivize spam (maybe even worse than with ads). As long as you keep that friction, you don't really change much because most sites on the Internet aren't worth anything, especially the commercially motivated ones. The ones that are worth something already charge money (and people pay because it's valuable) or they're not trying to monetize (academia, free culture groups, hobby discussion groups, etc).
"How do we get people to pay fractions of a cent" is the wrong problem to solve. The correct related problem is "how do we filter out all the cruft that isn't even worth 1 cent?" Blocking ads removes the financial incentive for spam, and is therefore a socially positive action in addition to being prudent security posture. Assuming ads have an effect on your psychology (and we ought to believe they do), it also helps you to remain a more moral person by preventing you from receiving and internalizing constant messages to consume frivolously. With climate change being one of the most important issues of our time, cutting out such consumption is imperative.
> Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
Friction. The vast majority of people are not going to go through the effort of setting up a digital wallet to browse, when the existing system allows them to do it for free.
Some people would for sure, but then you also need websites and creators to agree to participate in the scheme (or don't, and just unethically redirect ad revenue to yourself, like Brave used to).
And whatever users are willing to pay for not seeing ads someone is willing to pay more for users to see ads.
Of course the best would be to let users pay for not seeing ads and then shove them in their face anyway for maximum profit.
I don't think so. The fact you see any particular ad instead of another, is because someone put the highest bid for that slot to show you this ad, and nobody else was willing to pay more.
By very definition 99% of ads that could be in the slot are not there because someone is not willing to pay that much to show that ad, except for the single one that won the auction.
Ads have a maximum cost at which they don't become viable/profitable anymore.
The only difference is that now the user could bid on that ad slot himself, to keep it empty.
If you look at the average ad revenue, that wouldn't be all that much money. Certainly a fraction of what it costs to become a no-ad subscriber currently in various platforms.
Yeah. I think this is probably insurmountably hard.
ApplePay is about as frictionless as digital payments can possibly be, and I still occasionally abandon a purchase because of some annoying authentication issue.
I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse. That and once you've given something away for free, for so long, it's very hard to then charge for it.
> I imagine it's because people are worth far more to advertisers than they themselves are willing to pay to browse.
People must be ultimately paying the money somehow. Otherwise advertisers wouldn't bother.
People aren't rational when it comes to money. They will haggle and loose sleep over very small amounts, but have no problem overpaying thousands of dollars when it's a big purchase or throwing away their life savings.
But it still means they are paying it.
> Does anyone here know why the pay-to-browse model never really took off?
1. Free competition and lots of it.
2. No widely adopted standard for micropayment
3. Transaction processing fees often left very little for the site.
If I had to guess, I think the big reason that never took off is that no one can agree on the standard and everyone wants money on the edges, and won't agree with each other.
So, instead, we get companies like the New York Times thinking they're worth, what, $20/mo, per person, all by themselves?
TBH, pay to browse will not work. Look at Netflix/Spotify. Yes, it's a good revenue stream for them, but the incentives are plain wrong:
1) Consume more content -> More revenue -> Means more bloated content, esp. with LLM
2) They will simply re-introduce ads even though you're paying
I really don't mind ads, and I don't really mind ad-targeting, except for 'sensitive' topics.
But I despise animated ads, big walls of ads, interstitial ads, popovers, etc, etc, etc. Just be like google in the early '00s: I want content, and I'd be very happy to have non obtrusive relevant-to-the-current-topic ads on the side.
Only a small percentage of people are willing to pay for internet services. It is psychology and competition between the sites who offer services for free vs requiring payment. Paying for a service is a barrier to entry, while getting it for free and selling your data instead is not perceived as such. That is why all the big sites never would've taken off if they had paywalls.
That and regional differences. The amount that people in many regions would be able (not even willing) to pay would be tiny for the company running the site in many cases.
I know. Because for every paid service you have one that is "free".
Safari with [0]AdGuard works very well as well. Been using it for around 4 years now without any issues.
It’s not UBO, but it does work well. Safari is my default browser except for Google sites and development.
Safari does Manifest v3 blocking, exactly the same as Chrome except with fewer filters, and is otherwise worse in every way.
Third option is disable JS.
Although I wish more browsers made it easier to selectively enable it per site, like Orion.
Goodbye web-components. A W3C spec that mandates the use of JS to keep browser vendors happy. Once upon a time, there was HTML imports which didn't need this, but the ad-boys killed that spec.
>Goodbye web-components. A W3C spec
And good riddance. I really don't get any personal value out of the vast majority of modern web apps. Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more basic interface.
> Much, but not all, of what we do on the web could be via a much more basic interface.
... but it won't be.
Delivering information and digesting it from users is the purpose of the web as the user sees it. HN is a good example of a website meant to do this. No ads, minimal algorithms, no feature creep beyond a traditional news-and-comment feed.
Only one problem: that doesn't drive engagement. I come to HN because I'm genuinely interested in the content and discussion here. Being interested in content and discussion, though, is not nearly as profitable as being addicted. A lot of the UI elements and behaviors of websites today are meant to drive addiction, and thus, engagement.
Hell, HN itself might not even be profitable or even break-even. It's the side-project of YC; something that exists to further the profit-building exploits of that organization.
> Third option is disable JS.
You mean you’d like to use a web browser as a document viewer instead of an operating system? This ship has sailed a decade ago, at least.
Has it? That's mostly how I use my web browser today.
This is not practical for common folks. I wouldn't be able to get into ebanking, buy anything in eshops, probably most stuff I use daily would be at least half-broken. Imagine this for my elderly parents, just endless desperation and frustration, I am happy if they manage to use internet as it is and not fall for some scam or hack.
Heck, stuff sometimes breaks without me even trying to disable anything, like airbnb login via facebook popup stopped working suddenly few months ago (biggest internet mistake I ever done many years ago, as a host I am locked to specific well-rated account and airbnb support told me they can't migrate my account to another form of auth).
Edit: just saw its 'per site' - that would work for me, but not for my parents who live far. But damn I don't want to do this active fight of cat and mouse with whole internet. Firefox/ublock origin user here, on both desktop and phone for many years. Internet looks utterly horrible when I open it somewhere without those, hell youtube with all those ads is absolutely ridiculous shit service. Apple devices I've seen aren't that good either, shame that would be a great selling point for me.
Disable JS in 2025 does NOT work. Petty much every site only works properly with JS, with some exceptions.
JS is a core part of the modern web experience. 10 years go MAYBE Noscript would work, I never bothered, you end up having to whitelist a bunch of sites anyway even 10 years ago.
Whitelisting is still practicable. I use NoScript, and if I have to whitelist scripts from two domains of the company operating the site, while keeping those of the 40 other domains blocked, I still gain something.
That is a huge exxageration except your idea of "works properly" includes a bunch of user-hostile scripts that add nothing to the experience running in the background. Some websites won't work but more will.
Yes. I switched to it a couple of months ago. Saw no difference in usage compared to regular one.
It will get worse with time. Now certain types cannot be blocked which will become more common.
What can't be blocked?
Ads that use dns cnames to bypass block lists. Only Firefox has an API for this.
Ads that previously were blocked at the HTTP Response level. ManifestV3 removed this API.
A world where the number of ad rules exceeds the new limit. Which is 500 dynamic rules, 50 static rulesets, 30,000 rules. This may sound high but its not.
This is really really important now that server side tracking is rolled out at the major Ad providers. Keeping up a block list of the custom domains every site uses to mask their tracking will lead to an unsustainable cat and mouse game.
One thing I heard it it doesn't have the custom block element feature which would be a shame as I like the thing.
I've got used to the google lens thing. If you click the address bar then the lens icon and then highlight part of the page it visually analyses it, ocr's text, searches for the text, optionally translates it etc. I use it all the time because people will post text in image form.
It's not really a "switch" type of decision for me. That implies friction or commitment. I have every major browser installed, like a bowl of different flavored jelly beans. I pick whichever I want that day. Firefox isn't my favorite. A bit lower framerate rendering, a few missing features, a bit less extensions that I like. There's currently zero advantages I know of that would compel me to ever open firefox. They could literally release any novel feature that could win me over - I have no loyalty - they just don't have anything special.
Some sites have issues with Firefox, it is rare, but it happens. Some streaming services may not work at full resolution on Firefox because of DRM. You may also want sync with your Microsoft or Google account and not your Firefox account (if you even have one) for whatever reason.
Yes, it's fine.
There are also "upstream" options, like PiHole or NextDNS which block requests to ad/tracking/malicious domains at the network (local machine, router, etc.) level.
My issue with upstream options is that it prevents ads from coming through but their "place" on the page is still preserved so you still need uBlock to remove the elements.
Personally, I'm happy to see those empty spaces. It's a reminder of what we're up against and that my defenses are holding.
DNS based blocking is a good front-line, but in my experience, it's not sufficient on the modern web.
I can't say I understand why that would be the case -- probably naivete on my part. Are browser/JS apps loading ads via proxies or websockets or something? Is uBlock Origin somehow able to intercept those?
IIRC, Firefox at least has its own DNS-over-HTTPS client configured out of the box? So they aren’t using your DNS servers at all?
Can't say i have big problems using Edge in combination with a pihole, but i do agree that Firefox with the very nice plugins like uBlock origin does look so much better.
I mostly use Edge for accessing the big streaming websites and Firefox for everything else. Video runs somewhat better on Edge for me.
DNS-level blocking doesn't work very well. It only blocks requests to 3rd party domains; however, publishers can just turn to 1st party solutions, and many do just that.
E.g., DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search or the ads on YouTube. And while my NextDNS has blocked ads on my Samsung TV, it was unable to block ads on the new Max streaming service (former HBO).
I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking. If it's for privacy, I guess it's fine, but 1st party requests can and do share your data with first parties, with just one more level of indirection.
I, for one, block ads because ads can be dangerous for my family and even for myself. I don't want ads because I don't want behavior modification, or malware. I also don't want my son to watch ads for services that should be illegal, such as gambling services. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people that actually pays for subscriptions to avoid ads, I'm against freeloading as well.
So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway.
Not sure what you're using but I found that Google streaming devices hard code their 8.8.8.8 and .4.4 DNS addresses into their products. Blocking those IP addresses at the router forces the device to default to your router's DNS.
"DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search". It's true i see the weblink in Google results, but you can't click them.
"or the ads on YouTube" i use other methods for that on Firefox.
"I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking." I do not need any reason to block or allow any form of communication on my own infrastructure. I get to decide what connects to it and what comes in and gets out of it. I am fully aware some info will always get passed because otherwise i cannot consume the things i want to consume.
"So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway."
So far my list of 5 million blocked sites serves me quite well in pihole.
To your point, ads are brain malware.
> Can't say i have big problems using Edge in combination with a pihole
I use NextDNS on both my phone and laptop. Much easier setup, and much more portable (e.g. it'll work on cafe wifi).
Use uBlock Origin Lite, it works fine and in some ways is more efficient than the regular extension. Most people won't notice much of a difference if anything.
Firefox is debatably less bearable than a Chromium based browser with uBlock Lite at least on Windows.
Once most people run the lite version the trackers will change in a way that v3 extensions can't block.
> or the biggest web detox ever
I'm slowly thinking that this might be the correct way forward. It's difficult, at least for me, because I am addicted to the internet, but recently I realized that I need to be more mindful about my internet time, simply because it became shit, and using it actually has hugely negative impact on my life. I'm not sure how to phrase it, but it's not "ah yeah I'll do that someday", but rather "ok, things are getting serious, I am making a decision and starting to follow though right now".
Well, with it, it is just barely bearable still, if you do not pull yourself back radically and are paranoidly picky. Crap with ad vs crap without ad is the typical choice nowadays. The web is murdered by those whose livelihood depend on it, like a virus. Leaving alone only tiny safe heavens like this.
On my work laptop (not an old one), Chrome easily consumes a huge amount of RAM when I go to a page with lots of ads (including this article). I don't have an ad blocker on it.
Essentially, if I open 2-3 pages with these types of ads, I run out of RAM (16 GB) and the whole laptop slows down. I simply can't browse the web while working (which may be a good thing!).
Of course, part of the problem is Outlook and Teams and some other apps using a lot of RAM, but Chrome is the real bottleneck.
So no, not "just bearable". I couldn't even read this article. It's the norm that I just close the tabs without reading because I don't want a laggy PC.
What actually changes? ublock origin is still available, right? But it just can't block requests?
My understanding is that adblockers: 1. block requests from certain domains 2. block elements matching certain criteria
Does this change just affect #1?
Or the third option "you can still make them work by clicking "Manage extension" and toggling it back"
There is a ublock manifest v3 and it seems to be working ok (though you need to change the level and allow the permissions)
I have pihole in a docker container and it works pretty nicely.
Ah yes, the crypto shill browser. I'd rather take the thousand buggy stabs of Firefox than get down to that level.
> Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable
Huh? uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine.
I've seen absolutely no difference after switching.
The developers of u-block explain in pretty great detail why this is not opt.
I would encourage you to read their explanation.
*optimal
For instance it doesn't block youtube ads. Arguably the single most important reason people have ublock.
That's false, it blocks all YouTube ads for me.
Also, original uBlock Origin didn't always block YouTube ads.
Adblocking with YouTube has gone back and forth. It's not about original vs lite.
What about an "AI" browser? You put in a URL, it fetches the page, re-renders the page without ads, cleans up any mess as much as possible, and passes the result to your screen? Could that work?
I don’t think this is possible with V2 extensions.
> Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable
Oh please. Change your DNS to AdGuard or NextDNS and job done.
I’ll route this to my grandma and my gen Z relatives who never touched anything outside of an iPhone, thank you for your very insightful comment.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls#...
Not exactly the simplest instructions, to your point, but you can still just do it once for them or get on a call and walk them through it. They might even notice that websites load faster when they don't make dozens of requests to advertisers and trackers.
Simple DNS blocking has been insufficient for some time thanks to cnames. They also can't block first party ads.
uBlock origin is so much better than just DNS-level blocking can ever be
AdGuard also has a browser extension for blocking inline ads. The combo of AdGuard extension + DNS blocking is good enough that I haven't missed uBlock Origin
Does that work with DoH (DNS over HTTP)? It's my understanding that using systems like AdGuard or NextDNS or even PiHole fail to handle DoH requests. In that case the only solution is something like uBlock Origin.
https://help.nextdns.io/t/x2hmvas/what-is-dns-over-tls-dot-d...
> NextDNS supports all 4 protocols. See the setup tab for more information on how to use them.
It’s just a dns server, they use DoH themselves.
If you are trying to intercept dns traffic that ignores your dns setting that’s a separate issue.
ISPs make it difficult or impossible if you're using their router.
What? You can set a DNS server on every OS and device. It works for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
But that’s really only viable if you have a very small number of devices and those devices only have one user. Let’s say you have a family of 4, each with smart phones, two tablets, three computers, each with myltiple user accounts… setting DNS on each individually becomes extremely cumbersome. Not to mention all the other connected devices that want to throw ads at you these days, TVs gaming systems, etc. And god help you if you’ve invested in any kind of crazy connected thing like a fridge with a screen on it, setting device level DNS there might be so obfuscated t’s not possible.
Point is that using any kind of DNS based blocking is far better at the router level but the above poster is right in that a lot of ISPs these days make it impossible to adjust your router level DNS and even for someone tech minded setting up some kind of downstream secondary router can be become so convoluted that they just give up.
Fair enough.
Lot of noise today over Firefox claiming license to use anything you transmit with it ...
Tbf though, UBO Lite works well enough in the 'optimal' filter mode. On the pages I visit regularly I see no difference to UBO.
Why are you being fair to a company worth billions of dollars that are trying to control your computer and what you see? Do you regularly advocate for the devil as well? Who does that help?
The only alternative is giving up web browsing completely, because the 'new' Mozilla isn't any better than Google or Apple.
If you're not trying to be fair with your arguments then what's the point of making an argument at all? If you're deliberately introducing a bias to your arguments then you completely invalidate them to anyone seeking to find a grounded understanding. This can cause people to completely discredit any criticisms of products by Big Tech as just whining by the open source community. I hate this kind of mentality and unfortunately you're not the only one.
Places for which you would need to use ublock origin are ai generated seo spam or funnel to some product, why visiting them in the first place
Have you ever used YouTube?
Or any website in EU. Those idiotic cookie popups are half the reason I have uBlock installed.
You don’t really believe that, do you?
[flagged]
Recently I've been asking myself, what do web browsers and the web look like in twenty years? I've been applying this to all "free" software (e.g., VSCode) released by the large tech companies who ultimately are incentivized by profit.
I really have no clue, but as far as I can see the answer is never better. More centralized, more bloated, more invasive, less choice, and less freedom.
Personally, I wish it was more like 20 years ago.
I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news, zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad bar, and the lack of community.
I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20 a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an ad.
We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5 dollars here or there for disparate services.
Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course vid/pic sharing.
I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to have to download separate programs or visit different websites to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very community like.
I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.
As an avid AOL user, that is the worst version of the internet. I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet. Whatever some large corporation had paid AOL so they could build a shitty little Visual Basic type app that controlled everything you looked at. There were no ads because the entire experience besides the chat rooms and IM was an ad. It was a lot of people's first email accounts but spam blocking was so bad back then I count that as advertising.
I remember being blown away by discovering people would randomly make private chats and trying to guess at what the chat name would be for things I was interested in as a kid. Then I remember having my mind blown that AOL had a built in browser where someone had built a website, not a keyword, that actually had my niche interest that no one in real life did. Then I discovered you could download a much better version of that experience called a browser.
Your idea is just Facebook where you can't link out and is fully corporate controlled. Which I guess is actually Twitter.
I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
> I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet
Is it really that different from having the .com of a word today?
> I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
I struggle to see how you got to that conclusion, but it's an absolutely true statement nonetheless so I cannot complain.
20 years ago, but with gigabit Ethernet speeds and 5g WiFi. Oh, and modern dev tools in the browser. I’d hate to go back to only Firebug.
> I wish something like AOL would come back around
Yeah, that was the sentiment at the time.
It reminds me of that meme, maybe called the midwit meme?
On the left you have the dumb guy, saying AOL does everything. On the right you have the hooded guy, saying AOL does everything.
In the middle you have the crying guy saying no you should use Netscape browser, and ICQ for messaging, and usenet for forums, and dogpile for search, etc.
can anyone find this?
I can say my family never once paid for AOL or cared about its basket of features. But we did pay for NetZero for a long time until broadband become more affordable in our area.
AOL was a walled proprietary internet prison. It was basically the first step into the dystopian Ad-filled proprietary world we have now
Its not just the internet. Its almost everything in your life. Financialization of products and services seems to keep pushing products to get cheaper while providing additional supposed 'value'. In reality, you are usually paying more for less but are fooled into believing that you are getting more.
I was reminded of this recently by comparing an old 90s Toyota to the latest models. The 90s cars were over-engineered and 30 years later, had more breathing room to keep going. Meanwhile the latest stuff is all plastic pieces that have been engineered to perform many tasks using just one piece. The idea was that they could focus on making that one piece as robust as possible and still save money on reducing parts and making the operators life easier during assembly (no one cares about the plight of the repairman). All in the name of saving costs to keep the product competitive in the face of the declining value of fiat money.
Well even though its supposed to be better, the new stuff still sucks. People are holding onto their old cars, we lost so many wonderful 2000s cars due to cash for clunkers. The designs and colors are also more boring.
How do you fight this?
Well as software people we have an out: Homemade software and open source. Homemade software allows us to cut the cruft out of products that companies add. We pay for in our time but if it is important enough to us then it has to be done.
This applies to everything: You can make your own food instead of accepting the declining garbage from takeout/restaurants, you can buy raw materials and do your own woodwork/electronics/metalworking.
Even something like cars can be somewhat pushed back on. Communities form around popular cars to document and better understand the issues prevalent with certain models. Use this info to self select on a vehicle that has a large community and to help anticipate problems that can be coming down the pike with that particular model.
Again, no one has infinite time so you have to decide for yourself what things are important to you and take back control while trying your best to minimize nonsense in other areas.
VSCode futures doesn't look good, OSS wise. "Microsoft loves open source" is the joke of the century.
VSCode is still a very competitive text editor even without its proprietary plugins.
Ootb VSCode is already a superior experience to Emacs, which I only begrudgingly move away from because of subpar TypeScript + JSX support like 6 years ago. However, after I started using VSCode for work there was just no going back. I use VSCode a lot for text manipulations. I find its regex search replace much easier than using sed in the terminal. Multiple cursors, Git integration, beautiful diffs, command palette is just like Emacs M-x.
Without its proprietary plugins it's still a great gift to the public and forks like Cursor is a good showcase of that. Thanks to monaco almost every web editor nowaways have great usability, syntax highlighting and the keybindings that I'm familiar with.
I think the bigger joke of the century are open source beneficiaries that only take and give nothing back, but still have the audacity to demand for things and hound open source developers to implement what they want. You can't have your cake and eat it too
>take and give nothing back
Then don't release under MIT or BSD, and use GPL.
Ladybird, Servo, etc... offer a brighter future. Servo takes donations if you want to help put our collective thumbs on the scale.
It’s at the point now where basically everything you do is online owned by some online mega-corp.
Yes! Please support good paid software companies if you can afford them. Jetbrains, Sublime Text, others.
Agreed. Open source is great, but the only way we build the software world we want to see is by supporting the software projects which align with your values. Using software is not supporting it; contributing to it is, but that simply isn't viable for many people; paying for it also is, and that's viable for most people, especially software engineers.
Mobile web will be dead and Google will have neutered whatever's left with WEI when they get around to trying it again.
20 years? no jobs for sure. AI will do everything
