The last Chrome update also disabled it for me because it&#x27;s a manifest v2 extension. I use firefox on my personal computers, but might need to switch on my work PCs as well

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;ublock-origin-lite&#x2F;ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;ublock-origin-lite&#x2F;...</a>

But for how long? I&#x27;m sure Google is hard at work on Manifest V4.

The wiki outlines the differences.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;uBOL-home&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;uBOL-home&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Frequently-as...</a>

If it’s anything like Safari’s declarative blocklists:Ad blocking on Youtube.Youtube-blocking Safari extensions “solve” Youtube blocking by using non-declarative APIs that need full access to Youtube. Apple seems ok with that so far, but the APIs are not as goods, so their success rate is limited.Whether Google will allow new extensions that block Youtube remains to be seen.

uBlock Origin Lite is still available, thankfully.

I view it as a symptom of the broader effort to villify the fourth estate and condition people to act(vote) on their emotions rather than a rational look at verifiable facts.

People have come to accept dishonesty and sociopathy from corporations as normal and even acceptable unfortunately.

&quot;They didn&#x27;t immediately abuse their market power!&quot;Great. Very few companies do. What difference does it make?We don&#x27;t give bankrobbers credit for all the days they could&#x27;ve robbed a bank but didn&#x27;t.

The position is always, Google&#x27;s position is so strong they can do whatever they want even if it isn&#x27;t beneficial to users, this confirms that. I&#x27;m not sure the &quot;they could have abused this sooner&quot; defense is a good one.

I&#x27;ve never killed anyone, should I get your gratitude for it?

They had the market position and option to do that for years now.  &quot;Told you so&quot; whenever a patterns matches, and ignoring the times when it does not instead of providing a good model that encompasses both, is a fairly lame way to reason about the world.

Also true. But it’s a charitable way of putting a fundamentally broken contract on the open web since it was invented: you are in control of your browser. If you want reading mode, large text, anti-fingerprinting, disable autoplaying video, heck even banning popups, the browser is your tool and does what you tell it to. If Google or any other company comes between you and your browser then one part of the open web is discarded. I think extensions are gonna get nerfed even more in the future, for whatever reason large commercial interests have.

It was never free. The revenue streams are just hidden. It has always collected and sold huge amounts of data about every user.And regardless, using their ownership of the browser to shut down competitors is the very definition of &quot;anti-competitive&quot; &quot;monopolistic&quot; behavior.

To me it’s just another decision rooted in greed, to take away more Agency from the User Agent.

Right, and that&#x27;s why ad and spying funded products should be illegal. They don&#x27;t just distort but destroy markets. It&#x27;s an extremely unfair business practice.That people claim it&#x27;s impossible for a browser to survive without Google&#x27;s funding demonstrates how broken the market is by ad money: of course people would pay for something like a web browser if it were illegal to make money by selling your users. The web is obviously valuable to people.

&quot;Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...&quot;That&#x27;s some fatalistic wording. How about:Company that publishes a free product and business model relies on ads, stops distributing app that piggybacks on their free product while circumventing ads.

Exactly the reason why I use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;choosy.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;choosy.app</a> to always redirect everything Google Cloud to Chrome, but everything else to Firefox.That way if I click on some random GCP link in Slack it opens the link in Chrome, but everything else stays in Firefox. I don&#x27;t need ad blocking for GCP so that works fine.Sucks, but better than using Chrome full time.

Other Chromium-based browsers don’t work?That would at least save you from stuff like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17942252">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17942252</a>.

I use BigQuery studio often in Firefox and haven’t noticed anything being worse than Chrome. What problems do you see?

Yes; the movie where running genuine Microsoft Windows is damn near a requirement if you want to interact with Windows applications.Using Firefox and whatever for the Google cloud is kinda like running Windos applications in Wine or ReactOS.

100% agree with you. Unfortunately Chrome is damn near a requirement if you are interacting with the Google Cloud console. Try to use BigQuery studio in any other browser and you are in for a world of hurt.Have we seen this movie before?

Their engineers genuinely believe that shit too, which is just absurd bullshit.

Actually I have a problem is both. Chrome&#x2F;Chromium is Google&#x27;s product and it&#x27;s theirs to do with what they please, but if they do user-hostile things with it, that&#x27;s enough to criticise them for me, even if they&#x27;re honest about it.Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don&#x27;t think it would&#x27;ve been that much more okay if Google was honest and said &quot;users&#x27; ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we&#x27;re removing them&quot;.

And I don&#x27;t understand what is the benefit of lying as well - everyone on the internet knows what this is about, at least if they used ad blockers. A lot of people don&#x27;t, but they will not be affected anyway.

Where I live, Google rented out a huge Billboard to advertise Chrome, and it cites Chrome as &quot;the world&#x27;s most trusted browser&quot;I LOL every time I see it.
Imagine the lengths they have to go to, to try to make people trust a product they have.

&gt; Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.Google has a long history of &quot;accidentally&quot; breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It&#x27;s beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn&#x27;t move out of Detroit, they&#x27;d fucking run you out of town.

I don’t work for Google and genuinely think it’s better for users. It’s always bugged me that ad blockers request arbitrary read write permissions for all websites I visit, and it didn’t seem like that was ever going to change until Chrome forced the issue.

&gt; Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it.They shouldn&#x27;t be free to use all the money in the world to corner a market, rope in the conpetition and then abuse that position.It only works because nobody can touch them, it&#x27;s otherwise straight illegal in most markets.

The issue I have is not that they did it; it’s that they lied about why.Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it. People can use a different browser if they wish (I do).This whole “better for users” bullshit is why I don’t respect Google as a company. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.

As much as I dislike their Chrome practices, I am rather against the idea of forcing them to sell Chrome.For one, they simply have had a better product, at least in the past. Part of their large monopoly is due to just being better outright for a large portion of users (presumably). Are we to punish making overly-good products?For another, sell to whom? And why would they be a good steward?And yet another, there&#x27;s literally Chromium, which other browsers (built by other corps) use, e.g. Edge, Brave, etc.Did Google have to open Chromium? No.Disclaimer: I hold these opinions weakly and would love to learn more about why they might be ill-premised.

Well hopefully Google will pay the price for their greed soon enough.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;doj-google-must-sell-chrome-android-could-be-next&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;doj-google-must-sell-...</a>

&quot;Where there&#x27;s a will, there&#x27;s a way.&quot;

Gentoo user here: all the time. Worst part is that Firefox depends on NodeJS which takes a good day to compile on my 2c&#x2F;4t 3250U.

Why would you? Firefox is a spyware nowadays.

Emacs Web Wowser for the most part, for me, and it basically works... except when it fucking does not.The modern web, as we all know, is all kinds of shit. Anybody here compile Firefox recently?

Firefox and its derivatives remain the only true alternative at this point.

And ublock origin lite works just fine for me

That&#x27;s a BIG difference though, and makes the claim about security more believable, especially since it isn&#x27;t a sole restriction. There are also a number of ad blockers available for Safari, although personally I&#x27;ll stick with Firefox either way.Google is an ad company restriction use of the primary ad-blocker on its browser, it&#x27;s blatant.

This is coming from an Apple antagonist, but don&#x27;t the Apple OSs have adblocking at a system level (implying Safari)? This does vindicate Apple (but doesn&#x27;t help in the other legitimate scenarios that this API is needed, which I have been told do exist).

It&#x27;s time for a Google breakup from the DOJ &#x2F; FTC.They&#x27;ve gone well beyond what Microsoft did in the 2000s.Google owns so many panes of glass and funnels them all through its search and advertising funnel. They&#x27;ve distorted how the web (and mobile) work to accomplish this massive market distortion.Search, Ads, and Android should be broken up into separate units. Chrome shouldn&#x27;t be placed with any of those units.While we&#x27;re cutting, YouTube should be its own entity and stand on its own legs too.Apple, Amazon, and Meta need the same scrutiny. Grocery stores and primary care doctors should not be movie studios and core internet infrastructure. Especially when those units are wholly subsidized by other unrelated business units, and their under pricing the market is used to strangle out the incumbents and buy them up on the cheap.

People scratch their heads about how &quot;just a default setting&quot; can be worth an annual $20 billion payment from Google. It makes more sense if it&#x27;s actually for a raft of wildly illegal under-the-table measures this.Imagine what it would cost Google&#x27;s bottom line if Apple was truly user-focused and enabled ad-blocking on desktop, mobile and embedded safari views by default. Someone do the napkin math please!

Alright? Split iOS off from Apple, then split Apple Music off too?I hate these arguments where people point to some other shitty thing a company is doing as some sort of gotcha.

Apple is totally an advertising company. Have you missed the part about their stalling phone, tablet and laptop revenues, that they hope to compensate with &quot;services&quot; revenue, i.e. App Store 30% racketeering and App Store search ads?

Apple gets Google revenue for being their default search, and that is worth much less if the search ads pay less if Safari users were able to browse other sites untracked.

Honest question here: Could someone explain to me how Apple and Safari relate to what Google is doing?I currently use Adguard as a content blocker for Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Does this mean that Safari will also start restricting access to these ad blockers?

&gt;Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...Doesn&#x27;t Safari have the same restriction, also ostensibly for &quot;security&#x2F;privacy&quot; reasons? The only difference is that Apple doesn&#x27;t have a web advertising presence, so you can&#x27;t make the accusation that they&#x27;re &quot;abuse its market position to their own benefit&quot;.

&gt; It was never about improving peoples web experience.I kinda appreciate that you still apply some benefit of the doubt.

The CCP is much better organized with its “Do nothing. Win.” strategy. If Trump did nothing as well as they do, America would still be a superpower.

It&#x27;s funny how this behavior resembles the Chinese Party.

I&#x27;m surprised anyone expected anything different. Why would an ad company support something that assaults its main source of profit?

This is the most important question. What&#x27;s the best practice? Firefox? Something else?

&gt; I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacyWhat are you using instead?

Improving the security of their income stream :)

It is the gaslighting that is so annoying and insulting. An entity of such power and reach resorting to manipulation is disconcerting.Everyone will call them on it. Why not be straight with their intentions?An advertising company optimizing their technology to better support their business while improving security.

And developers can play a part in reversing that. It seems like it might already be happening:<pre><code> | month | Chrome | Firefox | Safari |
 | -- | -- | -- | -- |
 | Jan &#x27;25 | -1.29 | +0.07 | +0.84 |
 | Feb &#x27;25 | -0.75 | +0.08 | +0.03 |
</code></pre>
Note: Edge is also gaining. They use Chromium but their stance on Manifest v3 is unclear to me. So far they don&#x27;t seem to have any plans to deprecate v2 supportI know these numbers seem tiny, but if these trends were to continue, Chrome could be under 50% marketshare by June 2026 and overtaken by the end of 2027

Please don&#x27;t forget the part developers played in this by enabling Chrome&#x2F;Google to become so very dominant.

It wouldn&#x27;t have been a bait and switch then.

If it&#x27;s really that big of a problem this can be addressed by locking extensions by default and hiding the on switch where casual users won&#x27;t look. But come on, this is obviously a pretext. You expect people to believe that the most prolific adertising and surveilance company in history is crippling the ability to block ads and trackers for altruistic reasons?!

Yes, &quot;abuse of market position&quot; is path dependent.Offering something then taking it away is materially different from never having offered it at all.

Before the introduction of extensions, Chrome supported NPAPI. I can&#x27;t readily verify whether that was present in the first Chrome release, but it was present in very early releases. Browser Extensions was the alternative Google came up with to have a blessed API and sandboxed execution.Abuse of extensions was certainly a problem with IE. But, Google was also happy to use IE controls for Google Toolbar and other functionality. It irks me when a company&#x2F;tool makes use of another&#x27;s more permissive policies&#x2F;APIs in order to gain a foothold and then restricts others from doing the same with its products. It feels like pulling the ladder up behind you.

There was a time in Chrome when it didn&#x27;t support extensions at all. If Google had release an extension API like manifest v3 then, would that have been abuse of market position?The reason why Chrome waited for so long to add extensions was the danger they posed to users. I was at Google when Sergey often worried about what extensions would do to non technical and older users who get tricked into installing them, then I saw first hand that danger with my own grandparents. They had extensions intercepting every network request, redirecting certain sites to fake sites, and injecting code into pages. It was horrifying, and they were lucky that they didn&#x27;t have significant money or identity theft.

A company optimises for profit. Real shocker.

People&#x27;s web experience is in degradation for long time.No point using 99% of the web due to the hostile, fraudolent, abusive approaches on top of the hollow (yeh, very very gentle world for the thing what it is) content. No point searching for advice, products, job, as crap is poured at you while your actions are registered, your profile is sold, just to pour dedicated crap on you by the highest bidder.I have mail and 5 (7 with weather) pages I check regularly, and that&#x27;s it. That&#x27;s my online life. More like a hermit goes into town for tools and cans kind of digital solitary. Clicking on links only after reconsidering five times, if I am really interested in the possible content. Mostly here. So, so far away from the extremely curious me 20 or so years ago spending hours to the limit of my thirst and bladder, navigating all that is out there.It is very sad what humanity made out of the Internet. It does not even hurt anymore. It is numb blob where the feeling about the rich common knowledge source this was and could have been should be.

I don&#x27;t think killing actual, effective ad-blocking was the sole motivation of moving to Manifest V3, but it was certainly a nice side effect that was hard to resist.

Pretty sure they do rank sites based on performance: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;docs&#x2F;appearance&#x2F;page-experience" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;docs&#x2F;appearance&#x2F;page-ex...</a>

You linked to a crappy copy of an XKCD comic. Here&#x27;s the orginal. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;624&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;624&#x2F;</a>

What boggles my mind is the fact that surely people working for Google also use Chrome. Are they not up in arms internally because of how awful the web is without ad blocker?I have the same experience as you, every time I set up a new machine or watch friends&#x2F;relatives browse the web, it just blows my mind how bad the unfiltered internet is.

Yep. It isn&#x27;t just a less usable web, it&#x27;s a less safe web. But anything for those sweet ad dollars.

Makes you feel naked. I am running Firefox now, but there is a debacle on that now.

&gt; They&#x27;ve just decided that our sanity is less valuable than their ad revenue.Precisely why it should be broken up.

Been using uBlock Origin for so long I forgot what the raw internet actually looks like. Spent 3 minutes without an ad blocker last week when setting up a new machine and nearly lost my mind. Google knows exactly what they&#x27;re taking away from us - a usable web. They&#x27;ve just decided that our sanity is less valuable than their ad revenue.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmerhumor.io&#x2F;programming-memes&#x2F;browsing-without-adblock&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmerhumor.io&#x2F;programming-memes&#x2F;browsing-withou...</a>I feel really bad for less tech-savvy users who&#x27;ll be stuck with this nightmare version of the internet.

Let’s hope it still works at least on ungoogled chromium with manual setup. As soon as this stops working i’m back to only using firefox for good.

&gt; Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...What makes me sad is that if we go back a handful of years here in HN comments, there were tons of posts assuredly stating google would never do anything like this.Even though it should have been obvious that a company who lives and dies by ad revenue will of course do everything to protect ad revenue and block users freedom.

&gt; Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...Thanks, now I have coffee on my keyboard.

Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit...I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was &quot;well it improves performance&quot;, which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance.If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-rank sites based on privacy and performance.It was never about improving peoples web experience.

Chrome is no longer available on my machine. It hasn&#x27;t been for some years now but still.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43262531">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43262531</a> (&quot;uBlock Origin forcefully disabled by Chrome&quot;, 5 days ago, 204 comments)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43099417">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43099417</a> (&quot;uBlock Origin Has Been Disabled&quot;, 19 days ago, 40 comments)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43299886">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43299886</a> (&quot;The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome&quot;, 2 days ago, 663 comments)

seeing your first YT ad in a decade is quite the shock!

It is absolutely bonkers how many ads are in YouTube now. Nearly unusable without an ad blocker.

It was the pre-roll youtube ad that made me realise ublock was dead :-(

You are still allowed and able to block advertisements with extensions.

Switch to UBL, the manifest v3 successor to UBO, to continue to get updates, the performance is better too.

Does this mean it won&#x27;t be able to get updates to extension code(not block lists) anymore?I am getting high CPU usage with uBO since yesterday but I do have a lot of tabs so I was wondering if thats a bug that will get fixed.

that&#x27;s how it works, there are legal ramifications otherwise

Chrome will now be sold to TotallyNotGoogle, we&#x27;re saved.

just another reason to break up the monopoly

Apologies if this is elementary, but have you tried turning off DoH?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;dns-over-https#w_off" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;dns-over-https#w_off</a>

I wonder how much time not experiencing advertising on the internet saves?Whenever someone says how fast Chrome is I think about this.

Same here. Tends to be pretty inconsistent. DNS-over-HTTP(s) definitely disabled. 30s is a lot more than I&#x27;ve experienced, but there are times where it clearly struggles to look things up.

Firefox has some weird slowness with DNS that I have troubleshot to death. I still use it for almost everything, but sometimes I&#x27;ll have an entire day of 30s page loading times.

Which is why Mozilla are getting desperate to diversify their revenue.

That would be a good thing.
If Firefox is funded by donations, rather than by Google, it ensures there is no enshittification in the future.
And yes, donations can fund a big project, as evidenced by Thunderbird and Ladybird.

Indeed. Kagi proves users are willing to pay for search (me included, recently).

This to me is the ultimate sign that Mozilla has zero values or principles.They&#x27;ve long advocated that Big Tech is a problem, but as soon as somebody tries to actually address it and this coincidentally impacting Mozilla, they abandon any and all principles.

Part of what the DOJ is seeking against Google would severely impact Mozilla financially however, as they want to ban them from paying to be the default search engine.

After the Great Suspender debacle, I feel the same. I try to limit plugins&#x2F;extensions to as many minimal use cases as possible.

Yeah that&#x27;s definitely fair, I have the same concern.  Currently I&#x27;ve reduced my extensions to just a few that I either trust (like gorhill&#x27;s) or that I wrote myself.  But I think it would be huge if Mozilla built out the tooling needed to keep a better monitor on them.  It&#x27;s an extremely hard problem to be sure though.

This is why I prefer Safari&#x27;s content blockers.  As far as I understand, there is no risk of content blockers sending out information.

Luckily there&#x27;s an extension for that: [Under New Management | Chrome Web Store](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;under-new-management&#x2F;jppepdecgemgbgnjnnfjcmanlleioikj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;under-new-managemen...</a>)

Yep while this manifest v3 ugly thing is putting me on the brink of jumping ship (I compromise by having two browsers), as for your concern I found that Chrome is going to allow blacklisting extensions for sites, so now I can turn them off for the few sites that I really worry to grant extension read access.chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;flags, &quot;Extensions Menu Access Control&quot; flag.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;new-extensions-menu-testing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;new-extensions-menu-testin...</a>

My problem with extensions is it&#x27;s another development team to trust and monitor.  I need to know if the extension has been sold, taken over by a new lead, etc.

Google will just slip in a few more “improvements” to Gmeet, Gmail and YouTube that happen to not work or perform very poorly on Firefox.

Unfortunately this would only be helpful to Apple customers, which itself comes with significant downsides IMHO.  I&#x27;d much prefer a cross-platform solution

It would be enough if Apple realized the same thing. They&#x27;re in a position to have the best browser, and coast along ignoring the opportunity.

My understanding is Mozilla contracted its footprint substantially to remain sustainable in a future without Google&#x27;s monetary contribution.

&gt; They pay Mozilla to existDo they? I thought Google significantly reduced their payments to Mozilla a few years back, which started Mozilla current random-walk.Edit: As of 2023, they were as high as ever at 85% of Mozilla&#x27;s finances coming from Google [1] . However the DoJ antitrust case against Google targets Google&#x27;s payments to various entities (Mozilla, Apple) to make themselves the default search engine, thus threatening Mozilla&#x27;s income. I did not immediately find sources for Mozilla&#x27;s 2024 finances, but I can imagine they see the existential threat.&gt; and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.That&#x27;s just conspiracy-thinking.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mozilla_Corporation#Finances" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mozilla_Corporation#Finances</a>

&gt; They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.Come on, that is just crazy talk. I get that Mozilla has made some boneheaded decisions but this is baseless conjecture.

&gt; They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.I am trying to understand how this works? If they pay Mozilla to exist, yet their intention is to destroy their competitor, why even pay for them to begin with?

&gt; I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions,The problem is that Mozilla&#x27;s customers are not Firefox&#x27;s users. Mozilla&#x27;s customer is Google. They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.I think it&#x27;s pretty clear that the TOS change basically coincided with the removal of manifest v2 change in chrome.

It&#x27;s like a never-ending horde of zombies that comes in and makes this cheap shot over and over. My understanding is the CEO makes slightly more than 1% of their revenues. And it&#x27;s actually low compared to the typical tech CEO.But what&#x27;s the story of cause and effect here such that if they&#x27;d invested 1% of their revenue differently, they would jump from 3% market share back to 30% or wherever they were previously? Once you ask these questions out loud, it&#x27;s clear that people aren&#x27;t thinking through the steps of the argument.

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensionsDon&#x27;t worry, they won&#x27;t. They have more important endeavors like funding some new bullshit virtue signalling campaign and paying huge CEO bonuses.

You mean inatalling from local files? This isn&#x27;t ever going away, we have to test what we develop somehow

Can you install your own personal extensions without getting permission from Mozilla yet? Or are they still banning that? Because that change drove me away from Firefox.

FF is supporting V2 and V3 on purpose, so they are doing what you want

If this doesn&#x27;t give FF a noticeable bounce, FF really is a lost cause.

Truly the best angle Firefox could take would be to be stronger pro user: block ads, resist fingerprinting, hide annoyances, etc.

I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, unlike the locked-down and hobbled Chromium ecosystem. I suspect they do realize this because they&#x27;ve been really leaning into extensions recently, but over the years I&#x27;ve worried that Mozilla&#x27;s committment to Firefox isn&#x27;t as serious as I would like.Regardless, I&#x27;d love to see this give FF a big bounce in the stats. Something to reinforce that there are people out here that really want manifest v2, badly enough to switch!

The shareholders will be grateful! A great victory for google!

I love Kagi&#x27;s Orion but it&#x27;s still not good enough yet to switch off chrome completely. You realize this once you delve deeper, install extensions, and use it as your daily driver.

Proton and Kagi have most of the services I&#x27;ve personally needed to de-Google. GCP is nicer than AWS, so will probably keep that around as a paying customer. Only thing I haven&#x27;t found a great replacement yet for Google Docs (MS office is abysmal, but also lack of testing of alternatives so far :) ).

Spyware doing malware things. I guess it is unexpected in this case, but in hindsight just confirming its malware character.

I blacklisted Chrome in dnf (the Fedora system update manager) once we hit near the last version to allow manifest v2, but apparently it wasn&#x27;t enough.  They reached in to my system and deactivated&#x2F;deleted my manifest v2 extensions anyway regardless, even though my version still &quot;supports&quot; them.  I&#x27;m quite displeased to say the least.  Ultimately it&#x27;s probably for the best though as now my &quot;slow fade&quot; plan has to be accelerated.  Time to rip the bandaid off.

I&#x27;ve been using Firefox for years now after being an avid chrome user and I do not miss it at all.

only gets updated when published and doesn&#x27;t support custom rules or element picking :(

Isn&#x27;t there a lite version of ublock origin that works with manifest v3?

I have a similar situation, though for more personal, first-world problems. I used custom rules for things like YT shorts, Jira&#x27;s giant bar for emoji-responses in comments, etc. I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s a good substitute on Chrome because Google&#x27;s primary intent was to destroy the efficacy of this tooling.

Hoping someone can point me to a Chrome browser extension that supports custom block rules. My strange situ involves an IT-managed laptop &#x2F; browser that can&#x27;t access certain websites because of their embedded resources (eg fonts) hosted on 3rd-party domains; firewall rules block the embedded content, breaking the (allowed) main site I&#x27;m trying to visit. uBlock Origin was perfect: I&#x27;d craft custom rules to disallow problematic embedded resources, problem solved.

what does sock I&#x27;ve written a few of my own extensions and they&#x27;re manifest v2 ugh... but thankfully I was able to turn them back on

I re-enabled it last week but they forced removed it again days later. I re-enabled it by force and it&#x27;s still working, but it won&#x27;t be for much longer, I&#x27;m certain.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neowin.net&#x2F;guides&#x2F;google-turned-off-ublock-in-chrome-but-you-can-still-enable-it-here-is-how&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neowin.net&#x2F;guides&#x2F;google-turned-off-ublock-in-ch...</a>This URL, shared elsewhere in this thread, seems to tell you how to get it back up and running if you cannot do it easily; that said, I&#x27;ll be moving to FF if they continue their shenanigans.

Is it actually gone? I thought they just put that warning.I just re-enabled the one already installed on my devices.Once it&#x27;s legit gone gone though yeah I&#x27;m going to Firefox or use Edge for web dev stuffEdit: I will say I am a hypocrite though I am trying to build a following by posting on YouTube... I don&#x27;t control the ads on there, maybe you do when you are monetizable but yeah sucks I feel bad for the viewers. At the same time... I&#x27;ll spend weeks&#x2F;months on a project and no one cares so idk.

This is how Internet Explorer (via Windows), Chrome (via Google Search and YouTube) and Safari (via iOS) gained significant market share. Through another platform or service that they owned, that they could use to promote their browser.But large Web properties do not gain anything by promoting Firefox. Many are ad-supported, so getting rid of uBlock Origin is a good thing for them. Only having to test on Google Chrome (and maybe Safari) is cheaper for them. There has to be something in it for them to promote Firefox or an alternative browser.

The largest web properties pushing Firefox to users, or perhaps social media campaigns. It&#x27;s an outreach effort, the technical details are already solved. Make the Google&#x2F;Chrome brand toxic.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;privacy-security&#x2F;how-to-switch-from-chrome-to-firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;privacy-security&#x2F;how-to-switch-f...</a>

Opening FF with my existing 3 windows and 100 open tabs would be all it took :-)

The vast majority of Chrome extensions work on Firefox. Up until Manifest V2 being deprecated, the reverse was true, too.

I&#x27;m just hoping for AI coding to get competent enough in next few years to throw in deprecated chrome extensions code and get it converted to firefox.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;manage-your-logins-firefox-password-manager" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;manage-your-logins-fire...</a>

Yup. Sync across all devices, auto fill works a exactly as expected, and it&#x27;s a couple click process to port over all your saved info from Chrome.

Why not use an agnostic one like LastPass or one of the others?

What&#x27;s keeping me from moving away from Chrome is the password storage &amp; autofilling. Is Firefox&#x27;s password manager just as good?

To migrate, the average user will need to see the problem first. Most people wouldn&#x27;t care enough about it even if they magically could press a button and migrate.In the attention economy the browser and the mobile OS (and soon your LLM&#x2F;Perplexity agent) are the most important points to control the aggregate user data. So it&#x27;s a lost battle.For a sub 0.01% of the nerds there would be alternatives for the non-DRM content, but this wouldn&#x27;t change the big picture.It&#x27;s like the junk food business. Yes it&#x27;s bad for people, but it&#x27;s so addictive...

what ll it take to convert 80% of the world wide web users from chrome to firefox. can we write a super duper complicated migrator of sorts that literally installs firefox on behalf of the user, migrates all their data, migrates all extensions from chrome to firefox, even suggests alternative extensions for the ones that are not available and market the hell out of this migrator across x, bluesky, reddit etc?, One click migration from chrome to firefox, 0 tinkering

The source code is available for Chromium, not Chrome. You can always maintain a fork, but it&#x27;s a lot of work, and it&#x27;s not a great solution to the problem of &quot;world&#x27;s largest surveillance company makes world&#x27;s most popular browser&quot;.

Keeping MV2 going is a massive and unrealistic effort for a small dev group while continuing to incorporate upstream changes. You cannot leave a browser without those upstream changes as they include security patches.

The source code is available for Chrome. Suppose one downloads the source code, and then re-enables the Manifest v2? A bit of work, particularly when you have to do other things that probably allow it to co-exist with Manifest v3, and Manifest v4 when it comes. And prevent updates from taking it all out again. While working on it, flip the compiler&#x27;s command-line switch that allows the executable to run on Windows 7.How long after the announced Windows 10 end of life will it be before all the software companies say &#x27;Windows 11 is the minimum&#x27; like was seen with Windows 7?

I&#x27;ve been daily driving Firefox for several years. Everything I use on a daily basis works fine on FF, but every now and then you come across some random site that doesn&#x27;t load or loads poorly.

Amazon properties (the storefront, Prime) have been quite flaky for a long time now, but that may just be me.

I can&#x27;t login to the work-paid-for version of Microsoft Copilot with Firefox, for some reason. I&#x27;ve had one or two others - I think they were internal CMU website tools. And even more niche: My kids took a ski lesson last year at Snowbird and the website with their report card rejected anything that didn&#x27;t identify as Chrome. It _worked_ with mobile FF, but it popped up a &quot;YOU SHOULD USE CHROME&quot; banner and wouldn&#x27;t let me past.So, small stuff. Maybe Copilot isn&#x27;t working because of ublock, though.

The Teams web app doesn&#x27;t work (I refuse to install the OS level app)

Expedia doesn&#x27;t render properly in Firefox - some of the sections are missing, but it&#x27;s not immediately obvious what is missing. It took me a while to figure out why my wife kept having problems with that site, and I had to move her to Chrome to allow her to use it.I continue to use Firefox because I know when to suspect a website problem might be the browser, but she doesn&#x27;t have the ability to analyze a situation like this. I have this conundrum with other family members that I support. I want them to use Firefox, but I hate to have them run into an issue because of the browser I recommended.

I can&#x27;t get ticketmaster to work reliably on Firefox. I guess it thinks I&#x27;m a bot. I can use Chrome on the same computer and book tickets just fine.One crap product forcing me to use another crap product! ;)

Bizzarely, Microsoft Word on web seems to be the only thing I&#x27;ve encountered which has FireFox problems, specifically it&#x27;ll periodically &quot;save&quot; the document I&#x27;m typing and then delete the last sentence or two that I changed while it was saving. I think it&#x27;s some kind of broken state management on the MS side (leave it to MS). That&#x27;s the only site I&#x27;ve used though, and I&#x27;ve been a daily driver of FF for 10 years.

Sticky desktop notifications don’t work on macOS on FF, which means event notifications from calendar apps disappear within a few seconds, leaving no time to snooze them or act on them in any other way. Queue missed meetings.

Add-on replacements:
- Linguist for translations.
- Search by Image for reverse image search (there are others that just use Google Lens directly, but I use this one).Cast is a bit more cumbersome. There is fx_cast on GitHub, but it requires a companion app. Firefox seems to want to add cast based on a flag you used to be able to enable, but I&#x27;m guessing there are some restrictions from Google&#x27;s end they ran into.

My biggest complaints with my switch is 1) no Chromecast functionality on Youtube and many other supported video platforms, 2) Very minimal page&#x2F;text translation services (Arabic is missing), and 3) no search or translate from image (google lens) which I have gotten pretty used to. Oh and also, seeking videos is weird on FF, the mouse goes way past the scrubber when fast-forwarding or rewinding, just seems weird..

I was confused by &quot;main menu&quot; so I took a look and it is in the Help menu, for those wondering (I&#x27;m on Mac).I didn&#x27;t know this existed but will totally use it now! Thanks!

Be sure to use &quot;Report broken site&quot; in the main menu on that handful of sites. Often there are things folks can do to fix it for you, if many people are running into it - but only if it&#x27;s known.More info: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1de7bu1&#x2F;were_the_firefox_leadership_team_at_mozilla_ama&#x2F;l8ghtr2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1de7bu1&#x2F;were_the_f...</a>

I&#x27;ve been running firefox on my laptop for the last year, with Chrome on my desktop, as a way to head-to-head them. For folks contemplating the switch, it hasn&#x27;t been bad at all. Some better, some worse, but overall I rarely notice major differences except for a very small handful of sites that won&#x27;t work with FF.And I still have all of my uBlock origin happiness. :)

The adblock I use[0] (based on uBlock) hasn&#x27;t been available on the Chrome store nearly since day 1.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adnauseam.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adnauseam.io&#x2F;</a>

I use Firefox as my main browser and having &quot;tens of tabs open&quot; is something I do and there&#x27;s zero issues with that.

I constantly have way more than that open. On mobile it&#x27;s also over 100 tabs.

I have no problem with hundreds of tabs on Firefox.

Firefox works great with dozens of open tabs. The only thing Chrome has going for it is tab groups. Firefox has Tab Style Tree, which is a decent substitute.

I was using Firefox exclusively for years, but when I sold my Macbook and bought a Thinkpad and installed Linux on it, I grew pretty annoyed by Firefox.Specifically, I couldn&#x27;t view my 360 videos or photos on Google Images or Immich at anywhere near acceptable performance. The videos, recorded at 30fps, would get maybe 5fps. This was weird, because I have a fairly beefy laptop, it should be able to handle these videos just fine (especially since my iPhone handled it just fine).After a bit of debugging, it appears that there&#x27;s a bug in how it&#x27;s writing for the shader cache, and as such there was no hardware acceleration. I found a bug filed about my issue [1], and I didn&#x27;t really feel like trying to fix it, because I didn&#x27;t want to mess with Mesa drivers. I just installed Chromium and that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m using right now, and it worked with my 360 videos and photos absolutely fine.I want Firefox to succeed, but that really left a bad taste in my mouth; it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s weird to want my browser to be hardware accelerated.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1921742" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1921742</a> Looks like it might be fixed now, or at least they figured out it was an issue with Mesa

Surely this is hyperbole? I usually have hundreds of tabs open on firefox.

751 tabs open right now and growing.Firefox copes fine. Me? Not so much (:

1,740 tabs open right now on my wife&#x27;s Firefox and it seems to be operating just fine. Sounds like something&#x27;s wrong with your Firefox. I recommend a refresh which can be found under about:support

I keep 100s of tabs open for months in Firefox.  Chromium regulaly crashes after about 10-20.

I use Firefox as my main browser and it&#x27;s not a viable alternative to Chrome if you have the very common usage pattern of keeping tens of tabs open.

If one of my friends kept pitching cryptoscam shit to me I’d stop talking to them in short order. I suspect your IRL non-technical friends feel similarly.

You have to take the CEO&#x27;s philosophy into account when choosing technology tools unfortunately.I personally dmd Eich on Twitter during 2019-2021 ish. He&#x27;s opposed to censorship, tracking, government lockdowns during COVID, and authoritarianism.That is exactly who you want running your browser and search company if you wish to use an open Internet. It&#x27;s anti chat control, anti governments choosing which apps it&#x27;s citizens can install, it&#x27;s free speech for all, including &quot;hate speech&quot;. Open and free wild West Internet culture.

&gt; But in two days I have 4 new Brave users.What happens when adtech decides this is a problem because the hoi polloi have arrived? Have you thought about that as you&#x27;re cluing in normies?

Running uBO and Shields at the same time isn&#x27;t a good idea, generally speaking. Pick one and go with it.

I&#x27;ve been telling my IRL non-technical friends to use Brave. By far the easiest migration path, literally is Chrome, but with with a good built-in ad blocker and uBlock Origin. I&#x27;ve long since understood that any browser that I would use should be treated as an anti-recommendation for normal folks. I can already see the &quot;but the crypto thing&quot; and yeah, I don&#x27;t love it but it&#x27;s so out of the way that I don&#x27;t even know how to turn it on in Brave if I wanted. Getting people weened off of Google Chrome (tm) is better than trying, and failing, to get them on the &quot;ideal&quot; browser.Edit: Instead of downvoting actually try convincing a normal person to switch to Firefox and see how well it goes. I&#x27;ve been recommending it for 10+ years and they&#x27;re all still on Chrome. But in two days I have 4 new Brave users.

It&#x27;s learned helplessness, laziness, bordering on cowardice.

Well said. It also wasn&#x27;t worse in any way. It was strictly better.Firefox is definitely better than Chrome in some ways, but it is also worse in others. Notably performance and integration with Google&#x27;s password manager.

They switched because Google bundled invisible Chrome installers in other software that would not only make its browser the default, but also invisibly steal IE clicks.A move that was widely celebrated at the time.

I remember it being IE -&gt; Firefox -&gt; Chrome.From where I was sitting, Firefox grew from word of mouth. Friends old friends, or simply installed it for them and said “trust me”. And people were shamed for using IE.Over time Firefox started to feel more bloated, and Chrome was new, lean, and fast.Chrome then went through its own bloat phase, and now this.Browser monopolies have toppled before, through various means. I see no reason why it can’t happen again. Currently Apple is pretty much single handedly keeping Google from having total control, by only allowing WebKit on iOS.I have a feeling people would be more likely to switch to a new player than to run back to an old one they left once before.

People didn&#x27;t switch from IE to Chrome because it was better.They switched because it was MUCH, MUCH better.(And was part of the ecosystem, profiles, bookmarks, passwords, etc.)---For better or worse, no such disparity exists currently.

For now. Advertisers now know ways to bypass all blockers for Chrome.

They &quot;work&quot;, but not well.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-b...</a>

Until those things don&#x27;t work any longer.  Slowly the frog is boiled here.

They can still block elements from appearing on your browser but in the background the network calls are still being made. That means you are no longer being protected from tracking and your internet is once again being slowed down by the loading of ads

Right, google knows not to turn up the temp too fast, else the frog might jump out!

The adblockers still work on Chrome though.Pretty sure people are figuring out to switch to uBlock Origin Lite and ads -- including on YouTube -- are still being blocked just fine.

Bookmarks, history, generally historical reliability, and (biggest reason for me) password manager.I rarely have to type&#x2F;remember passwords anymore on Android or web and it &quot;just works&quot;. I know there are password managers out there that ostensibly handle the password-saving thing and are browser-agnostic but when I tried it in the past I had issues on some sites and, when it did work, it felt clunkier.

What&#x27;s in Chrome that they are so used to? I use Vivaldi, Chrome, Firefox on every day basis, and can barely see a difference.

Well, today mostly yes. But at the same time, I&#x27;ve been an Opera user (if not fanboy) for a good decade, until they ditched their own engine and basically started from scratch with chrome as a base. It lost 99% of its features overnight.I really struggled to switch to anything else. Firefox was definitely the most customizable, but finding extensions to replicate every feature of Opera, and properly at that, was a never-ending nightmare.Only at that point did I realize how vital a browser has become for everyday tasks, and as a power user, how much you get accustomed to it. Maybe not if you&#x27;re just running stock Chrome or Firefox with two extensions, but Opera was so feature-rich that I didn&#x27;t ever install a single extension but needed about a dozen on Firefox to try and mimic it. In the end I just stayed on Opera 12 until it wasn&#x27;t even funny anymore. It must&#x27;ve been about two years. Eventually so many sites broke that I just switched to Firefox and only installed uBO and greasemonkey. It hurt but over time I just gradually forgot what using opera was like. Sometimes I think back and really miss it. Some of it is just nostalgia by now, but the struggle switching was real.

People say similar things about Google Search, and a few times I&#x27;ve tried not use Google Search but every time I&#x27;ve tried it&#x27;s become clear that the reason I use Google Search isn&#x27;t just habit, but that it&#x27;s the best search engine for most queries I perform.I&#x27;ve had a very different experience with browsers though... I switch browsers pretty often and with ease. I genuinely can&#x27;t get my head around why someone would continue to use Google Chrome if they&#x27;re unhappy with how they&#x27;re treating their users. The UI between browsers is 99% identical. The most annoying thing about switching browser is just having to spend 10 minutes setting things up, but that isn&#x27;t going to exceed the annoyance of having to see ads constantly for months or years.There&#x27;s really no good reason not to switch browsers. Your habits are not going to change between browsers. Unless you&#x27;re a Chrome power user and using some very niche features in Chrome there is very, very little difference between Firefox and Chrome for the vast majority of tasks.

Only the Android version has  uBlock just fyi. Also, I&#x27;ve never been able to watch movies on a plane with Firefox mobile.

Wanted to note that uBlock works on Firefox mobile browser too - it is excellent.

While JS debugging seems to be a bit slower, I find their HTML&#x2F;CSS debugging tools far superior to Chrome&#x27;s. Neither browser engine is great for the whole package, but overall I really prefer Firefox when it comes to dev tools.

Debugging on Firefox has always been awkward with sourcemaps.  The sourcemaps load late, so breakpointing is hard at load time.

In the end sighing and going &quot;stupid Google&quot; is a lot easier than changing even the smallest of habits.People also seem to think switching over is some kind of involved process for some reason.

The Stockholm Syndrome.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stockholm_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stockholm_syndrome</a>

Not only google seems to won this battle but ad industry as a whole. Youngest generation is nowadays so much conditioned to advertising disguised as content or being the content they won&#x27;t oppose it.

Posting this from firefox: most enterprise tools are only tested under Chrome, and many will break with no recourse when used on firefox.And it&#x27;s worse with extensions. For instance right now the OneLogin extension is dead on firefox, and while it&#x27;s a crappy service, it&#x27;s cheap and enterprise friendly...so employees in the contracting companies will only be able to log to corporate resources through Chrome.It&#x27;s not as hellish as the IE6 situation was, but boy we&#x27;re pretty quickly approaching it.

It&#x27;s not so much &#x27;Chrome won&#x27; as &#x27;Firefox lost&#x27;I still have no idea why Firefox&#x2F;Mozilla think they need to compete with the other browsers. None of their &#x27;10 Principals&#x27; is &quot;win the browser wars&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;about&#x2F;manifesto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;about&#x2F;manifesto&#x2F;</a>

I tried to switch to Firefox - but it lacks one feature that&#x27;s particularly important to me: the ability to use a site as if it was its own app (so, not inside a tab, but with its own window and own icon in the dock).I went back to Chrome, re-enabled uBlock for now, and will probably switch to the lite mode when it is completely removed.

I hear so many people IRL complaining about this. I tell them to switch to firefox, that the adblockers still work there, and they still won&#x27;t switch to it because they are &quot;used to chrome&quot;. I really feel like google won this battle. People will through a lot of abuse just to maintain their habits.

This made me go back to Firefox after 15 years of using Chrome personally.

uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store