I wonder if it's been on purpose or just, as always, their automatic algorithms being imposible to contest when they're wrong.
Honestly, Google's (and general tech giants') willingness to let people's lives be caught in the cracks of their algorithms in their pursue for scalability scares me more than any ideology they could push.
More and more, we're seeing developers and content creators being banned or demonetised, people being shadowbanned from dating apps that represent a majority of your chances to find a significant other, and so on.
I think we need legislation to deal with these issues: people subjected to punishment should be able to know the rules they're being subjected to, the way they supposedly broke those laws, and have a non automated chance to contest the ruling. Even if these businesses aren't public property, when they represent an almost monopolistic chance to get the service they provided they should be treated as if they are.
It goes like this: Google bans or disables something, then they pretend they made a mistake, but still delay fixing it for days or weeks while giving amateurish explanations for these delays. In the end what this tactic achieves, is hampering a software Google disapproves (or competes against). The tired users switches to a different software (made by google?) or stop using the software altogether. The same tactic targets competing developers.
This sort of evil behavior doesn't require intent or actual malice to form.
All it requires is that panic efforts to fix things be primarily allocated to problems that hurt google and not primarily allocated to things that hurt google's opponents. Or for infrastructure that has a history of hurting google to get disabled while infrastructure that has a history of hurting others gets ignored in favor of spending more time on new projects or fixing things that hurt google.
IMO characterizing it as involving malice ('pretend') actually _understates_ the problem. Google's actions are sometimes explicitly malicious, but they're even more often malicious OR indifferent, as that is a strict superset. If one day they decided to stop being actively evil this problem would not go away.
Maybe it could be reduced with the right kind of attitude towards introspecting and seeking out systemic causes of evil consequences even at their own expense. I heard there was once a company with a "don't be evil" mantra, but they abandoned it as they grew.
This also explains why the same evil conduct sometimes shows up in cases where no one can figure out any way that google actually benefits. It's a lot easier to cause harm through indifference than greed because greed requires that you have a way to benefit. Most conceivable harmful acts don't have much of a benefit for anyone.
There is no such thing as a megacorp's indifference to increasing their profits and achieving their strategic goals.
You can't plausibly claim indifference when Google's business processes that took many millions of dollars to set up and optimize promote Google's success by harming Google's competitors and taming Google's existential threats in user-hostile ways that range from perhaps subtle to outrageously obvious.
They didn't start doing this yesterday. No amount of plausible deniability can cover a gaping void this large.
Google's behaviour is entirely consistent with a huge company exercising its monopolistic power in a largely unregulated environment. They do whatever they can get away with.
I see your argument, and while it is plausible, it is muddying the waters. The twitter thread I linked above is from a former Firefox vice president, not from some random person on the Internet. People at Mozilla also thought that Google is playing fair game. When they realized there was a malicious intent, it was too late.
As a precaution to such tactics like, I have (long time ago) switched for Firefox
Portable, which updates properly, and also backup up its folder and keep a backup of all add-ons .xpi files, (winrar for Windows has a nifty naming mechanism that you can add YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS on the backup name), so if there is an update I don't like, or if after an update I am left with half my add-ons being disabled due to incompatibility, I roll back and stay there for a couple more months till either my add-ons work, or I find and alternative.
Mozilla is far more honest than Google, but better safe than sorry.
> I wonder if it's been on purpose or just, as always, their automatic algorithms being imposible to contest when they're wrong.
Further down the github issue, another person attempts to submit the same build recieving the same response. But then asks for clarification on the applicability to uBlock only to receive an excerpt from ToC bundling advice...
Pretty sure this is not algorithmic. As the dev said they are being stone walled.
Indeed. A friend of mine used to work on YouTube's moderation team. Turns out a lot of the "algorithm" is actually humans, hiding behind the shield of automation.
This scares me a little as "it was algorithm's fault" seems to be a good excuse for tech companies to get away with their monopolistic behavior. A few years down the road and they'll blame "AI" for the misconduct.
That's the developer relenting and trying to resubmit, after fuming at one of their users suggesting to do so. The reply they get is the same as the original reply, including the ToS (right? Not "ToC") but excluding the bit about risking being banned if the same vilation occurs multiple times. It still looks like an automated reply though.
So I thought/researched/wrote for 10+ years about possible legal frameworks and regulation for the 21st century; and in the end it seems an untenable proposition to 'force' such evolution by way of law, if we look at the actual history of most sectors — energy, construction, steel, media, telco... and now electronics and tech. I mean it's wishful thinking and whatever 'law' ends up being circumvented. Concentration is inevitable.
What does seem to 'work' is the subversion of one sub-market by another, e.g. when we transition from radio to TV, or when began the post-Facebook era. These are technological innovations. Political science taught me one thing: what changes the world is not what we think or say, it's what we do, and the most groundbreaking actions are those who create the everyday things that change our lives in dramatic ways — mobile phones, cars, planes, TV, YouTube, Netflix, Maps, chats, what-you-use.
Ergo, if we want a truly "fair" network, I think there's no other way but to make one. A real innovation that pretty much owns the market of inter-human communication, eventually. Something the magnitude of netscape/javascript at the end of the 1990s, or SMS, or Facebook versus everything else before, or streaming video and audio... a real shift in 'what you can do' or the way you do it.
If it is impossible to prevent concentration (and I don't believe it is), then oligopolists will have to accept some legal obligations that smaller companies don't have.
It is simply unacceptable that you can be kicked off extremely dominant platforms without explanation or recourse and often without even getting your data back.
There has to be a higher barrier to obliterating someone's livelihood.
Once again sci-fi proves astonishingly prescient - this kind of world was predicted as early as 1965, in Gordon Dickson's darkly humorous short story "Computers Don't Argue" (which you can find on Google if you're interested).
You can shout at bureaucrats. You have some basic rights. You can demand escalation of your issue. You can't do much when your Google account is banned.
A friend of mine works as a lawyer dealing with PUC's. Trope of faceless bureaucrats pisses him off because he see it from the other side. Because they'll actually listen to some 80 year old lady's complaint at a meeting[1] and then maybe try to figure out what they can do to not piss her off.
[1] The meetings that people who rant about faceless bureaucrats never show up at.
The "opposite" version of that quote makes less sense to me than "other way around" or "reverse". The opposite of "man oppresses man" would be "man doesn't oppress man", no...?
Maybe, I just googled the quote because I didn't remember it exactly. But I think it's actually clear that "man doesn't opress man" is not the intended meaning precisely because that wouldn't make sense.
IMHO attribuiting actions to automated systems rather than their owners hides who's actually responsible. If we don't accept abusing power we shouldn't accept abusing power using AI either.
I wouldn't be able to guarantee "capital" (i.e. people with access to large amounts of it) are smart enough to understand the outcomes of sufficiently complex systems.
I think the mortgage derivative swaps crisis taught us that. Powerful fools are still fools, and there's nothing about the system as-is that prevents some fools from becoming powerful.
In that sense, it's entirely possible we have bad outcomes from automated systems created by people who don't understand them. And that's the ambivalent case.
The actively evil case is: "How much would I have to pay you to design an unethical automated system?"
You're right, active evilness is not the only case or necessarily the bigger problem. Not knowing what you're doing doesn't mean you aren't acting unethically though when you risk others' welfare for your own gain.
But actions your automated systems are still your actions, regardless of intentions and outcomes. If we hold people responsible for negligently causing damage, we should also hold them responsible for negligently causing damage using an automated system. And of course, we should positive outcomes a system causes to the people behind it as well.
Or we could just prosecute App Store monopolies. Nobody should ever have to go through google, or apple, or Microsoft, or Facebook, or amazon to publish software. The point of software is to be portable. I’m sick of buying artificially crippled crap.
There are several problematic patterns at play here, and not all of them are store monopolies: App stores are a clear cut issue since they're a clear walled garden, but soft monopolies are even worse in my opinion. By soft monopolies I refer to those services whose utility is intrinsically tied to the number of users: youtube, social networks, messaging apps...
I'm pretty sure I can build a tinder clone with cool extra features pretty easily - barring maybe the infrastructure to support a giant number of users and the legal issues of operating internationally. But such an app would be completely useless, since the point of the app is that their userbase can easily be half the dating pool of your city. The same idea is true for many internet businesses - once established they're almost untouchable. they can't be challenged unless they screw up royally or someone's able to launch a giant enough marketing campaing that can bootstrap a large userbase in a matter of days.
Join to that the tendency towards monolithic ecosystems (google, apple, to a lesser extent microsoft, huawei...) and the result is pretty scary.
The problem is that you don't. You can earn big money maintaining COBOL software on mainframes, no FAANG there. As long as it is a choice it will be really hard to do something about it.
When I search for "firebase vs ..." I don't get parse server, I get nonsensical rubbish that folks won't compare with firebase. like mongodb, heroku, google analytics, amplify. But if I search for "parse server v". the first suggestion is firebase. Google is pure evil, you just have to open your eyes to see all their dirty tricks.
> on purpose or just, as always, their automatic algorithms being imposible to contest when they're wrong
given how often this happens, and the money google makes off and puts into these systems, this is "not either or" but rather two flavors of "on purpose"
I'm European, and pretty happy that the GDPR exists, but even I can't deny that a law is just as strong as the ruler's capacity to enforce it, and I'm a bit sceptical about the EU's ability to effectively govern the whole internet.
I wouldn't imagine they're impossible to challenge in cases like this. In fact I wager this post amounts to a challenge as it's nearly guaranteed a Chrome extensions developer will see it.
Not all apps have millions of users and make front page news. Now imagine how hard it is to contact anyone inside Google if your app/extension is not that popular.
Google must be forced to open up Chrome to third-party extension stores.
A monopoly deciding on the kind of browser extensions we get to distribute and use is sickening. As Chrome is a dominant platform, our work is prevented from reaching users if it does not align with the bussiness goals of Google, and extensions that users want on their devices are effectively censored out of existence.
Again, the solution in the face of this company is not to ask them to behave nicely, but to force them to open up their platforms, so that the future of software we enjoy today does not depend on the whims of Google.
As an example of their behavior, I've shared my discussion [1] with Chrome Web Store reviewers when the time came for one of my projects to be taken down. You cannot expect them to respond properly and apply critical thinking, and showing even slight resistance may lead to further retaliation from their part.
The extension review process at Firefox is not flawless either, but you get to talk to human beings who respond appropiately, offer sensible viewpoints, listen to your feedback, and adjust their position during reviews.
Google must be forced to divest of its search business, Android business, ad business, browser business, office software, and web properties into wholly separate corporate entities.
How would this actually improve competition? I agree there is a problem, but in my view and opinion the solution is enforcing a regulated market that protects consumers and allows for new competition to enter even lacking scale.
Competition is means to an end, not an end goal itself. The goal is user-friendliness, and solutions improving on that are OK even if they don't improve market competitiveness.
Safari has only weak protections, basically url-level blocking equivalent to Pihole. Last I checked ublock origin does allow blocking elements by DOM selector.
One day ads will start being plexed with content over websockets and the DOM-level protections will be all we have. Firefox is really the only alternative here.
> Safari has only weak protections, basically url-level blocking equivalent to Pihole. Last I checked ublock origin does allow blocking elements by DOM selector.
No, Safari content blockers can target selectors as well.
The top ranked comment on the page is a call to switch to Firefox. Google clearly does not have a monopoly on browsers, and we should let the market decide which extensions policy is preferred.
Now, whether Google is abusing its monopoly on Search to prop up its Chrome install numbers is a different matter.
Chrome has 2/3 of the browser market and growing. At what point does it become a monopoly? Also don't forget the vast majority of Firefox's revenue is a royalty from Google.
It becomes a monopoly when the supply of browsers is controlled by a single entity and the entry of new market participants is prevented or highly restricted.
Having a large market share does not make you a monopoly if you do not control the supply and restrict or prevent new market participants.
Since a browser is a piece of software you can install with a couple clicks in a couple minutes, and anyone who wants to can make one, even mostly based on the same code as Chrome in fact - I fail to see how Chrome can be considered a monopoly. Even if it had 90% market share.
Chrome got where it is by computer savvy users telling everyone who would listen to just install Chrome and going to every computer they helped keep running and installing Chrome on it. The exact same thing could happen for Firefox over the next 5 years if the winds really start blowing in that direction.
> Since a browser is a piece of software you can install with a couple clicks in a couple minutes
Only on Legacy Windows. This is not so clear cut on nuWindows or even Android. Ignoring iOS for this particular discussion, that's a separate monopoly.
iOS is also not a monopoly. When you contort the definition of "monopoly" to mean a "non-open ecosystem" then IMO you seek to abuse the anti-trust regulations on the books to promote an open-ecosystem ideology.
iOS is a closed ecosystem in a highly competitive marketplace. Customers -- when given the choice -- have chosen to opt-in to that closed ecosystem billions of times over the last decade.
There are absolutely pros and cons to a closed ecosystem. Which is why it's so great that we have so many options for computing devices on the market occupying various spaces on that closed-open spectrum to choose from!
> iOS is a closed ecosystem in a highly competitive marketplace.
And yet, Apple's profits grow, including per-unit. Not much competition there.
Firefox compiled for iOS cannot be distributed on the store, and since there is no way to sideload apps, Apple has a literal monopoly on Browsers. Where's the choice there?
Limiting our creativity and avoiding to take certain routes because Google might disapprove is horrifying. Though in this case the takedown was arbitrary, there is no defense against your project being singled out.
I am not a Chrome user, but my users are. Good luck with your project getting traction when you are censored from distributing it to 70% of the market.
It's actually baffling how people are defending Google and saying it does not have a monopoly in the browser market. Just imagine Microsoft banning your software for arbitrary reasons from being installed on Windows, and then being told that there are still other operating systems on the market.
> Hey all, I'm Simeon, the developer advocate for Chrome extensions. This morning I heard from the review team; they've approved the current draft so next publish should go through. Unfortunately it's the weekend, so most folks are out, but I'm planning to follow up with u/gorhill4 with more details once I have them.
Armin here, the developer of Search by Image. After that experience I felt it's necessary to share the entire discussion. That is how Google treats developers in exchange for enriching their platform, with a list of nonsense allegations, and if you speak up, retaliation. This practice is well documented at this point, and the best way out for those targeted is to hold your head down and maybe plead for help on social media.
So yes, Google will eventually be forced to open up Chrome to third-party extension stores. Google will not get to decide what software the majority of humans can install in their browsers, the same way Microsoft is not allowed to block you for arbitrary reasons from installing software on your Windows devices.
On the other hand, blindly accepting browser extension upgrades is a huge security vulnerability. There was a post some time ago about how popular extension projects often get bought by adware/spyware companies and they were able to publish malicious changes directly to user's browsers without any validation.
> On the other hand, blindly accepting browser extension upgrades is a huge security vulnerability.
That argument can be applied to any software, being allowed to run code on your devices comes not just with the freedom, but also the risks. I don't think restricting people's freedoms is the right way to somewhat reduce the occurrence of malware.
> There was a post some time ago about how popular extension projects often get bought by adware/spyware companies and they were able to publish malicious changes directly to user's browsers without any validation.
I think you're referring to one of my blog posts. :)
I would never hold it against Google if they purged malware from Play Store. Particularly since android makes it easy for alternative appstores to exist, most notably the superb F-Droid, which mitigates some of the risk of Google getting it wrong.
When alternative sources are not readily available, the calculus changes. When the platform is a walled garden, the matter of banning the wrong script/app becomes more serious. Apple's appstore, Mozilla's firefox extension platform and Google's chrome extension platform fall into this category. Because they make it difficult to install apps/extensions from other sources, they have a moral responsibility to perform to be more careful with what they ban.
(Also, I do not accept the premise that Google is actually trying in a meaningful way.)
This is a situation of their own making. They're the ones that pushed for invisible automatic extension upgrades.
Firefox's old system of you needing to manually initiate upgrades was much more secure, and encouraged user responsibility for the code running on their machines. Google wants to infantilize the user, take away all choice, claim users can't make good decisions and then claim anything control they remove is for the user's benefit.
They're a bunch of stinking liers.
At this point anyone claiming to be a platform needs to regulated just like we regulate platforms before the internet.
I have a friend who works in the compliance department of one of the big international commodity exchanges. They are responsible for regulating the platform (his words) and preventing anything untoward happening, but that also means the company itself cannot "double deal" it can't participate in the markets in anyway. In addition they have two fed watchdogs that do regular invasive audits to ensure that they're actually following the laws and regulations.
It's time for internet companies to be put to the same standard:
If you call yourself a platform get ready to be treated as such.
If you don't wanna be a platform and you have 70%+ of the market get ready to get broken up.
> Google wants to infantilize the user, take away all choice, claim users can't make good decisions and then claim anything control they remove is for the user's benefit.
As a developer with 18 years experience, I am not sure I have the time to make good decisions. I am not going to audit the code of everything I install by reputation. An average user has no hope.
No offence but you seem to have just done exactly what GP accuses Google (and most other big s/w corps to be honest) of doing. I am an average user (in the sense I'm not a professional s/w dev although I do know coding and have a more than normal interest in the inner workings of computers, but most youth are similar anyway. No one is dumb unless they've been trained to relinquish thought), and in two decades of using computers and the Internet I have to say I did not get hoodwinked into installing a single malware or getting a single virus. And uptil at least the last decade s/w wasn't as controlling and infantilising as it has lately become, and I got along just fine. In fact the slight difficulty actually enabled me to learn interesting stuff which modern UX almost totally stonewalls with its opaque "let me hold your hand" interfaces.
1. I generally trust when I update linux that things have been inspected. Maybe I'm dumb. I also trust that if I don't update immediately but a few weeks or months later, if anything snuck in it has been found, reverted, fixed. So, by not making updating automatic that would seem to help somewhat?
Of course the opposite is if there is a critical vulnerability then automatic updating helps many people. I believe this is mostly why Windows is so insistant on updates is that so many non-tech users were not updating and then getting powned.
2. It seems like maybe there'd be a market for a curated service. Neither Google's App store, nor Apple's, nor the Chrome Web Store, nor the Firefox Extension Gallery are curated well IMO. They are all 80-95% full of crappy software meant to scam you in one way or another.
I wonder if someone would make a startup that for $$ curated software and/or extensions including checking changes. Maybe publishers would have to pay to certified or maybe users would pay to fund the checking. Well I can wish :P
The solution for that would be to subscribe to specific repositories, similar to how Debian does it for example. Anyway, even if they just let people to manually download and install unsigned extensions the risk would only fall on the people who chose to do that. These that wish to do so could still continue and use google's walled garden.
Many crytocurrency users have a browser extension based "wallet". A malicious update pushed to Metamask, the most popular ethereum wallet application, could end very badly.
Modern tech companies enjoy maintaining the delusion that developers that make apps and content on their platforms are extensions of their employees and contractors and they have the right to dictate and control their development. This is obviously bullshit. The security argument is a red herring since a third party can maintain a trusted software list without all the conflicts of interest.
For those of us on Microsoft Edge, it's time to uninstall uBlock Origin[0] from the Chrome Store and install it from the Microsoft Store[1]. It's about time someone seriously challenges and smokes Google's boots.
You could, unless you're like me and having never been on Blink. I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years straight, since it was Phoenix. Edge is my backup/secondary browser and it's great. If you want the benefits of Chrome without Google, Microsoft is the final boss that can't and won't be pushed around by Google.
I love how, despite even kowtowing to the pro-Mozilla brigade here with assurances that you’ve long been a faithful user of their product, the fact that you said anything good about MS Edge still caused your text to get disappeared. They must feel threatened by it.
The second MS Edge is on Ubuntu or Arch, I’m installing it! And I’m absolutely certain that if MS keeps adblocking facilities in place while Chrome drops them, they’ll gain a ton more users like me.
Maybe soon, Google will be paying Microsoft to make Google the default search engine! Funny thought, but I doubt it...
I am a Firefox diehard, but I have been using and following Edge since MS put out the first canary. It's definitely my second choice. Firefox has enough exclusive features (like containers) that keep me from moving to a Chromium browser. For me, everything is chosen based on merit, not some belief system that a Blink-only world would be a terrible thing. I'm not sure that matters at all, and don't buy into that narrative that we need it for choice. There are still major players all building off it, and could diverge again. The Microsoft executive that suggested Firefox join them as a Chromium variant was correct. If anything ever pulled me away from FF it will be Edge for sure, and mostly because it is Chromium based.
My intended audience with that original post was the legion of Chrome users, but I could see how the Firefox cult (which I've long been a part of, check my oldest HN posts) could see it as negative or the "wrong answer". I never found Chrome to be quite right in all the times I've kicked the tires over the years. But on Windows, Edge being the native browser will ensure it's optimized to get the absolute best battery life out of laptop, a huge perk, and is quite frankly on the merits just shaping up to be a great Chrome-alternative on all platforms. No reason to resist the right-answer just because Microsoft is the one that appears to be bringing it.
Well yes, but technologically, it's the only non-KHTML descendant browser engine in development. Mozilla is working on the revenue issue, though it is a considerable concern. The best thing we can do to help Mozilla is to simply use Firefox and try and bump its market share numbers up.
I won't say no, but these donations go to Mozilla Foundation and are used to advance their tech evangelism work, such as their successful lawsuit over net neutrality in the US.
Mozilla Corporation develops Firefox with their income from sources like their contract with Google and other search engines. Donations are not used for Firefox dev.
Genuine question: what are they doing to alleviate the issues of Gecko rendering compared to Blink? As I understand it, most developers target Chrome, so they make it work with Blink, not Gecko.
Bugs are fixed where necessary, but I don't think they've stooped to implementing Chrome's bugs yet. Most of the work is social - reaching out to owners of websites which are broken in Firefox and asking them to fix them.
The MS Edge one is offered by "Nik Rolls" and not "Raymond Hill (gorhill)" like the one on the Chrome Web Store and Mozilla AMO. I'm guessing they're not the same person so why should I trust this extension instead?
I tracked this down earlier today while I was considering what I would tell people to switch to, looks like
- The official ublock repo links to it, so it's reasonably trustworthy, but it's explicitly not controlled by Gorhil. The author has what appears to be an open offer to give control of it to him.
- It's out of date.
- There is no real plan to make it up-to-date until edge finishes moving to being a chromium fork.
If the chrome store version dies, you better be prepared to see the edge version get significant less attention. I love alternatives being available, but this only makes the situation somewhat less bad.
That was fixed faster than I’ve ever seen Mozilla fix anything.
Still, if MS Edge comes to Linux without the manifest v3 blocking restrictions, I’ll try switching to that first because I want a Chrome-based Chrome competitor supported by a major entity.
Wow, this scares me a lot. So if you upload an update to an existing extension that has many users, if a human reviewer arbitrarily decides to reject the update, the entire extension is removed from the store? Or just the recent update?
If the entire extension is removed that makes updating an existing app a terrifying process. Do they apply the same standards to top paid extensions like LastPass and Grammarly?
I run a freemium SEO Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io) with 30K active users - if the extension got taken down suddenly it would anger + confuse existing users and directly impact sales. As a backup, you could ask users to download and install the extension in developer mode but this would crush the conversion rate for the free version and you'd lose all organic traffic via the Chrome Web Store.
Google already killed Chrome Apps (taking with it functionality you couldn't do in Chrome extensions) and Manifest v3 is going to introduce yet to be decided restrictions. At least these restrictions don't rely on the whims of human reviewers though.
Right now, my stomach drops whenever I see a Chrome extension development announcement.
> Wow, this scares me a lot. So if you upload an update to an existing extension that has many users, if a human reviewer arbitrarily decides to reject the update, the entire extension is removed from the store? Or just the recent update?
I've had an extension in the Chrome Web Store for 5 years and it's been unilaterally un-published with no warning at least 3 times. This is an extension that has many thousands of active installs, is free with no ads, and has specific simple functionality (defines a new tab page) and no access to browsing history or other permissions. It's the absolute best case.
2 of the 3 times, no reason was given. The exact same version was later re-published, after far too many emails. The 3rd time, a debatable reason was given - though again, the same version had been up for many years and was serving thousands of users.
Each time the extension gets un-published, it starts a days- or weeks-long ticket thread with Google's painfully automated review process. There's not a Google employee who simply explains what they did and why (and why no warning was given). Google just chooses from a set of email templates. If you're lucky and/or keep emailing over and over, they'll add 10 words about what was done.
I've had an IRS audit and, having experienced both, the IRS audit was easier, more predictable/logical, and more enjoyable than any of the 3 attempts to get my extension re-published.
(If anyone from the Chrome Web Store team wants help improving the publishing and review process, feel free to contact me. It's so broken that I can't imagine Google needs more input, but I'm willing.)
None of this is surprising or remotely new for Google. As someone who has dealt with Google’s moderation process from other products, it’s basically the same shit as it was 15 years ago. This isn’t a Google Chrome Webstore specific issue, this is a universal Google issue.
I imagine the sloppy processes were the result of keeping things automated early in Google’s life and as they grew, to obfuscate spammers. Then, as Google got bigger over the past decade and morphed into a dis-functional bureaucracy, any hope of improving those processes was lost. Smaller companies can get away with these sorts of things, but once you are under the lens of politicians and anti-trust regulators, it starts to cause a material impact on the business. The price is going to be paid eventually, by Google’s stockholders.
In the short term this specific uBlock Origin issue may look good for Google. Less ad blocking users for Chrome means higher revenue per install. Many of the bad decisions the Chrome team made were probably strongly supported by user cohorts and revenue data (like forcing Google logins on Chrome if you logged in to Gmail.) That might be enough for some of Google’s executives and middle managers to earn self directed bonus stock options. In the long term, we all know what happens when the early adapters move on to other products.
Correct, it may get pulled at any time for any reason. Any DMCA notice (valid or invalid) will also typically pull your extension for about a month, if you're lucky. If you rely on your extension to pay rent you should probably try to make sure you have a personal contact somewhere in that part of Google because they will probably break it eventually.
Is anyone really surprised? Google makes all its revenue from ads. A couple months ago there was an incident where if I recall correctly, someone published a browser on the play store which allowed users to install desktop browser extensions, one of which was an adblocker for YouTube, and it was removed with vague reasons?
Google has been taking steps for a long time to make it harder for adblockers to work on Chrome, and this is only the latest in the trend.
uBO works just fine on Firefox, both on mobile and desktop.
> I am hopeful, but also I must say in my opinion Firefox is nowhere near Chrome when comparing performance, developer tooling and quality.
I have the opposite experience. I use FF on all my computers and mobile, and when I sit behind some other dev's Chrome the tools are simply atrocious. Maybe it's not the quality that is different, but the way we use the tools? I might have "aligned" myself with FF, as you (and many others) have with Chrome.
I mean if I press Cmd+P to look up a source file and Firefox doesn't suggest the source mapped one before the ES5 compiled one, it's already beyond me how I should ever seriously work with that tooling. It's just a matter of speed and convenience. But my workflows of course might differ from what others do.
With quality I was referring to the actual code quality of Firefox, not so much the interface. See my post below about DOM events changing order when debugging. My instinct just tells me that something is deeply wrong under the hood if something like this can even happen.
Firefox has better tooling for CSS (really good flexbox for e.g.) but it lacks on the JS side.
One basic feature that is missing for e.g. is that one cannot open a file using the syntax filename:line:column in the source editor. You will need to navigate the line number manually after opening the file.
Thank goodness.
Browsers are for browing the internet.
File Managers are used for opening files.
I lock down SeaMonkeys JS.
Personally I like SeaMonkey as it is community build Mozilla.
Many of the "features" have settings in preferences.
It seems to me that the Mozilla Foundation is pushing the project in some weird spots(DoH) and while not ad revenue based, they do take money from companies.
Notice the Search Provides list?
Who uses Ebay as their primary search provides?
Heck who wants to search from the URL bar.
Otter-Browser is making great strides and I use it on untrusted sites.
Please make the browser simple and not hide settings in about:config.
Parent comment might be referring to Kiwi Browser, a closed source fork of Chromium for Android that allows desktop extensions.
Though it's currently available on the Android app store, and the reason it was briefly removed was because it included built-in background YouTube video playback, not ad-blocking.
Of course, you could always get the app from another store.
"Though it's currently available on the Android app store, and the reason it was briefly removed was because it included built-in background YouTube video playback,"
Oh, so being anti-competitive as their native youtube app will NOT let you play in the background unless you pay for it. Bingo.
Eh, that's sort of like saying Spotify is being "anti-competitive" when they block apps that give you Spotify Premium features for free.
Third-party apps for streaming services aren't meant to be a competitive market. At least with YouTube you can still download third-party apps elsewhere, such as youtube-dl for desktops or NewPipe on F-Droid, even if apps that violate YouTube's TOS are removed from Google's own app stores.
What does blocking "on Spotify" mean? It's not as if Spotify is blocking songs within its own catalog or something: these pirate apps exist outside of Spotify, except they hijack Spotify's streaming service.
> If they merged with... let's say Medium, and now blocked articles about such apps, that would be a problem.
Writing about piracy, as TorrentFreak or a Medium blog might do, is not the same as piracy itself. The former is journalism, protected by free speech; the latter is not.
Detecting and blocking those apps from accessing the Spotify servers.
> They're dealt with in the same way, by getting legitimate app stores such as Apple's to take down the pirate apps
Those are modified versions of the official app, violating its copyright. That's not the same thing as blocking a third-party app because it doesn't work the way Spotify likes.
In other words, the app itself is being pirated. That's a completely separate issue from "Spotify Premium features for free".
> Writing about piracy, as TorrentFreak or a Medium blog might do, is not the same as piracy itself. The former is journalism, protected by free speech; the latter is not.
Sure. I thought you were talking about third party apps, since your second paragraph was about third party apps... A pirated official app is piracy itself. A third party app is not piracy.
It's a distinction without a difference. Whether you use legal or technical means, blocking an offending app that violates the terms of streaming service is not "anti-competitive", as the parent comment accused. Neither Spotify nor YouTube is obliged to offer bandwidth.
I'd rather YouTube use legal means to remove offending apps from app stores, rather than technical means that would interfere with apps outside of app stores as well. I like having youtube-dl available, thanks.
> It's a distinction without a difference. Whether you use legal or technical means, blocking an offending app that violates the terms of streaming service is not "anti-competitive", as the parent comment accused. Neither Spotify nor YouTube is obliged to offer bandwidth.
I think you're missing what the argument is.
Youtube blocking something that violates Youtube TOS: completely fine
One part of a massive conglomerate company blocking something because it violates the TOS of an unrelated part: anti-competitive
> I'd rather YouTube use legal means to remove offending apps from app stores, rather than technical means that would interfere with apps outside of app stores as well. I like having youtube-dl available, thanks.
Youtube isn't using legal means, in general. They get apps taken down that don't do anything illegal. So the distinction does matter.
That's not "anti-competitive". What sort of competition is being blocked? No court is going to side with third-party apps that depend on YouTube's servers while violating the terms on which they're allowed to use its streaming services.
And what does it matter how the company is organized? YouTube is in fact a direct subsidiary of Google, not just a sibling company under Alphabet, but so what? Would calling it "Google Video" make a difference?
The problem with the earlier hypothetical example (of Spotify acquiring Medium and blocking articles about apps that violate Spotify's ToS) was not cooperation between Spotify and Medium, but issues regarding free speech, insofar as that applies to a private platform.
The analogous situation with YouTube would be content on Google platforms discussing third-party YouTube apps... and in fact, there are plenty of videos on YouTube itself discussing youtube-dl or apps such as NewPipe.
> Youtube isn't using legal means, in general.
That's semantics. Call it technical vs. non-technical means, then, or whatever.
The problem with that line of ideological reasoning is that it implies YouTube should use technical means, such as locking down its API, rather than just booting offending apps off the company's own app stores. The end result would be worse for users.
I have been using it for a few "years" now. It has exceeded my expectation for stability from a "nightly" product. I don't even remember having problems with it in last few years, and it's my primary browser.
I'm currently using FF 70 beta on the Aurora update channel on Linux and so I've had no complaints. Performance has been on par with Chrome/Chromium and a huge leap over the FF 6x releases, especially on Linux.
At the moment I only have one issue with FF. I can't use bookmarklets on pages like FB and Twitter, because of some wrong implementation of a content policiy or something like that...
My issue with FF is that it doesn't batch load the favicons after importing bookmarks from Chrome. The globe icon is fugly. The items in bookmarks are too closely spaced and look bad. It just looks like amateur hour.
Having switched to Firefox three months ago, the three things that I miss most are,
1. The integration with Google Translate, which I understand would be difficult for Firefox to replicate
2. The ability to right-click on an image to search by image, which is probably similarly difficult to add to Firefox. [Edit: Thanks, vatueil, I will give that a try.]
3. How Chrome is less picky about what text it identifies as a url. E.g. If you highlight wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/qpf/day1-2.shtml in Chrome and right-click, you can navigate to that address, but Firefox doesn't realize that it is a url.
However, I only miss these conveniences a couple times a month, so I can live without them.
Image Search Options is an add-on for Firefox that lets you right-click an image to search for it on Google as well as other image search sites. Also available as a Chrome extension.
Even simple stuff like finding text on a page... I use the highlighting of occurrences in the scrollbar WAY more than I ever realized.
The breaking point for me to go back to Chrome a few months back was Mapbox was chewing up SO MUCH MORE resources in FF. As someone who does a lot of GIS dev in Mapbox that was a no-go =/
I have to run a dedicated Win10 box because native Office automation is a huge part of what I do. I've had to go to lengths to get the LTSB (and am working on the LTSC) license because it's the only version of Win10 that's controllable + secure. I also have a 2015 MBP for my Adobe Creative Suite workflow. All of my dev infra is Debian 10. Best tool for the job yo.
I'm not going to bury my head in the sand and use tools that are only 20% performant because "ideals". I'll do my best to switch over (which I did for over a month) and if it's not working out I'm gonna ditch. I have to use Chrome until FF gets on the same level. I'm a startup engineer - I can't afford to neuter my productivity, I have to use the best tool for the job.
I'm a heavy YouTube consumer and this just seems like a headache with extra steps/complication, while shooting features like live streaming + chat in the head. Also it's a normal use case to view videos in your browser.
I rarely view livestreams, nor use chats. I don't know if there are alternatives to either.
Using mps-youtube to search, curate, manage, and play lists of videos, without relying on YouTube's server-side management is a real bonus.
Hooking mpv into the stream more smoothly would be useful, and I don't have a good method yet. But given my primary use-case (listening, audio-only), the fact that in the case of video and audio you really can only watch/listen to a single performance at a time, and the fact that in general what's most useful for me is to have a queue of content that I'm going to watch/listen to, in sequence, non-browser tools turn out to be far more useful than browser-based ones.
Most especially when you throw auto-play and advertising into the mix, and find yourself with multiple auto-playing tabs amongst ... well, I'm embarassed to say just how many browser tabs I typically have open, but it's a lot.
Yep - tried going to a hybrid solution but the thing is 80% of my utilization of a browser is working on my startup, with the additional 20% being "general surfing" (ie: reddit, HN, blogs etc.)
If my split was different I'd feel quite different about it... I just need Hangouts, Mapbox, YouTube, etc to work 100% of the time without headache. Also running two browsers was difficult because it's like "where's that darn tab!!!" half the time ha.
My solution to this crap is to eventually do something like a pihole setup upstream from the browser and call it a day.
I think this is missing the point. Assigning blame doesn't really matter - one works for his use case and one doesn't. When you're trying to get work done the path of least resistance is more preferable than using software that performs poorly because of your ideals.
But to answer your question: If they are based on the same code, yes. I don't see why you wouldn't.
But they fundamentally cannot be based on the same code if you go deep enough. The system calls / API are different, so the implementations have to diverge at some point.
Historically that has been seen as a Linux issue- while I agree its frustrating that web developers don't always test with Firefox, games/software not working on Linux was something the Linux community tried to fix with projects like WINE. Even now, Valve is doing more work for Linux compatibility for games than most studios.
I, since day one, always felt chromium UI was slicker than any other web browser out there. Slighty less lag, slightly simpler overall. Something that I love about software in general.
Not the OP, but password management and syncing in Firefox is a bit clunky.
I use and love the send to device feature and password syncing (I use FF as my main drive for desktop and mobile), but they are quite slow compared to Chrome. I get it that Chrome is syncing aggressively, which would have been nice in Firefox too, even if it eats up my mobile data.
Chrome web view is also the default web view in Android.
I use and love Firefox, but password storage really shouldn't be handled by the browser. They've never done a good job at it. I use and recommend Bitwarden wholeheartedly.
syncing is alright, I admit I never liked it, but it works enough to do the basics stuff (automatic plugin install, shared bookmarks) without caring much more. Maybe it's amazing and I just never learned about it.
I personally use Session Buddy on Chromium to keep tabs (no pun intended) on what windows are open and what tabs are inside. I save and restore my sessions using this extension as well. I haven't found any suitable replacement extension for Firefox that works like this.
They'd get +googol respect from me if they'd ever actually say that line. It sucks that companies can't just communicate honestly about their intentions.
Not exactly a secret, this is a quote from their Q1 earnings call:
"Let me now turn to our segment financial results. Starting with the Google segment, revenues were $36.2 billion, up 17% year-over-year. In terms of the revenue detail, Google Sites revenues were $25.7 billion in the quarter, up 17% year-over-year. In terms of dollar growth, results were led again by mobile search with a strong contribution from YouTube, followed by Desktop Search. Network revenues were $5 billion, up 8% year-on-year, continuing to reflect the performance of the primary drivers of growth, AdMob, followed by Google Ad Manager."
Sure, but the words in the previous comment of yours were direct statement of intent. That's different from talking about what are the drivers of revenue, without mentioning what are the problems and whether they want to do something about them.
Yea, the funniest thing is I bet a big percentage of Googlers use ublock origin. Their entire business is based around pushing annoying ads that nobody wants on people.
The reason there's not is that the store is filled with extensions that have enough users to deserve an actual explanation. At scale they'd just need to have a sizable review staff with actual training and policies, but they don't want to.
It's time to switch to Firefox as my main web browser. It's faster and generally more efficient than Chrome plus it has the most important extensions.
The most surprising thing is that the Android version of Firefox is excellent. So good that I switched from Chrome a few months ago when this expected news first dropped. No ads on mobile is awesome.
Anyone thinking of installing Firefox should check out the Multi-Account Containers addon. I'm pretty sure such functionality doesn't exist for Chrome, and it makes it possible to isolate different sites and logins from each other. It's one of the best reasons to switch to Firefox, in my opinion.
I love it. Wish container settings would be synced though:
https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...
#1 most requested feature so there's hope, although it's been open for over two years. Maybe now that the new bookmark sync mechanism is rolled out in Firefox 70, the sync team may have capacity for a new task.
Very annoying, especially if you are testing stuff or debugging in firefox and frequently change profiles. Also disabling seems to reset all settings for the container add-on which is not great to put it mildly.
I don't get why this lives in an extension. It's even advertised in the options, but requires downloading a separate component. Creating an awkward experience as what looks like a core feature lives in an external module. I imagine there is a non-zero number of users who look at containers then opt not to use it because of the download requirement.
I do get it. I've been using it for several months, and I run into problems fairly often. Nothing wrong with the implementation, AFAICT, but it takes a fair amount of thought to assign sites to different containers, and you can easily end up following links that cross container boundaries and then don't work right because of the context change. I've even run into several corporate sites where federated authentication simply won't work in a container, at all.
"I do get it. I've been using it for several months, and I run into problems fairly often. Nothing wrong with the implementation, AFAICT, but it takes a fair amount of thought to assign sites to different containers, and you can easily end up following links that cross container boundaries and then don't work right because of the context change."
See my comment above - I think the obvious workflow for containers is a container window, not a tab, and all tabs created in that window inherit the container settings.
As I also note, above, I don't see how to manage per-container cookies and history ... I can't clear history for just my "banking" container (or whatever).
I really want to make heavy use of a container-like feature but keep stumbling over things like this.
"Anyone thinking of installing Firefox should check out the Multi-Account Containers addon. I'm pretty sure such functionality doesn't exist for Chrome, and it makes it possible to isolate different sites and logins from each other."
Remind me - is this different than the "Container Tab" choice in the File menu ?
I find the built-in container functionality in Firefox to be surprisingly awkward and poorly thought out ...
For instance, the very first use-case that I attempted (create a Window, not a tab and have all new tabs inherit that same container) is impossible.
It also appears to be impossible to clear the history of just a container.
These are basic use-cases that came up, immediately, in a cursory exploration of the feature - I wasn't digging deep to find these ...
I thought the same for the first month or two, but as I started examining what it was doing and why, a lot of their choices made more sense.
Their contrainers are domain centric, not WI dow or tab centric. You can tell a domain to always be in a container, and then on the prompt to change contrainers when you visit th at domain, you can confirm to always switch.
Locking a window to a container would result in people following links and logging in again in accident in a different container, or being constantly annoyed that it wasn't the right one. If they closed the normal WI dow and kept that one, it would be annoying until they figured it out, and they would probably blame Mozilla thinking it a bug.
It's not a bad idea, but I can defi itely see why they would leave it out of the regular setup, as it's prone to causing confusion and only really useful for power users. It's ripe to be implemented as an additional addon though.
That's basically the process I went through with 3-4 other complaints I had. On actually thinking through it, they had one of the best sane approaches. Maybe when more people are familiar with the concept and how it acts and looks they can extend it, but there's only so much complexity you can push to the general public at one time.
Try it and see, I’m very happy with it. You can even specify that any time you go to a particular domain, you use a specific container. Great for separating work from personal for a work machine.
Unless something has changed, the Chrome functionality associates an entire window with a particular profile. Firefox lets you have tabs in different containers, colour coded and all in the same window. I find this much nicer to use.
Thank you for posting this, never realized such a thing existed. Makes it easy to maintain different identities. It's made by Mozilla too. Wonder why it isn't a core feature of Firefox.
They try to develop most new features as extensions first these days. It keeps the release cycles from impacting each other and lets them make sure that the extension APIs remain useful for other developers. If it turns out to be a good feature they'll either bundle the extension or build it into the browser from the extension. That's not always something people celebrate though, see the pocket stuff.
It probably will be. Mozilla frequently moves extensions from Labs (which existed then got cancelled, and now has been reinstated iirc) to core Firefox.
It has been a core feature since v50, albeit with less feature than the addon. It's still disabled by default, just need to toggle the following configs to enable it:
+1 for this. Takes a bit of configuring before you have it all working seemlessly, and it's probably not ready for non-tinkerers - yet - but it's really powerful.
No support for Android (yet). Install this Facebook container [1] on the desktop.
A request: I run Firefox nightly [2] as my main browser and would like to request everyone to consider using a pre-release version of Firefox if possible. It helps us make the argument that Mozilla should not run experiments in Firefox stable.
Been running nightly builds since I think 0.4 - makes web development ‘fun’ as you can never be sure if something works or not in a browser nightly build! Fortunately I don’t have to do that much any more.
I don't know why people choose their browser based on resource usage. You can have a browser run by a company looking to loot the public good for their own gain, or a non-profit looking to keep the web open and free.
Hold on I'm going to pick the one that's marginally faster and more ram efficient...
> Hold on I'm going to pick the one that's marginally faster and more ram efficient...
In both cases, people are choosing products because they're better. "Better" for most favors properties of the product. "Better" for you favors the politics of the product. Both are completely valid approaches.
I think you should look more in to FF financials. They are not exactly as liberated as you are thinking.
There is the Mozilla Foundation which holds all the IP, governs development, and provides supporting infrastructure.
Then there is the Mozilla Corporation-- the profit seeking portion of the conglomerate. They are guiding product development and contracts which will either bring profit now, or in the future. Think about their big forced Pocket feature. This is a future profit driver, if it is not already.
Source where FF gets the lions share of their funds.
I'm not saying they are bad, but use some critical thinking and stop making corporations heros, generally. Hold them accountable.
Be aware, use your voice, vote with your patronage.
Vanilla firefox is slower than chrome but WebRender is noticeably faster than chrome. Chrome on a 4K monitor slows down to a crawl, but WebRender handles it like a champ. It can be easily enabled with a flag.
- Can you please fix text rendering on mobile? Sites like reddit render at desktop resolution on mobile screen, and there is no clear text sizing that works. With Chrome I just set my size option and move on with life.
Can we just say it? Reddit's redesigne has made it measurably less performant and harder to us. Nothing happens when u press a link for about half a second. They clearly switched to some kind of spa but I don't understand why.
I have webrender testing enabled and three days ago I opened Firefox Nightly and the UI was completely wrecked due some unexpected WebRender bug that was fixed after updating. So I’m glad they’re testing it on expert users first :)
EDIT: Nope, I’m not one of the default-on “safe” configurations.
Hey, I think this site's audience is technical enough that it's okay to just give them the name of the option: about:config -> gfx.webrender.all -> true
Go to about:support and search for WebRender to check if it worked.
Works great for me with Kubuntu 19.10 / Mesa / AMD. It didn't work when I tried it a couple of months ago.
I can't notice any real difference, having been using Nightly (dev) edition for a full year now. Incidentally, my company (one of the largest tech in the world) uses Firefox by default (and nobody had any reason to switch).
Google simply can't be trusted with all that ads stuff
Have you tried a fresh profile as a test? It’s possible you have about:config settings or other random hacker detritus that may be leading to slowness.
I recommend using the "Open With" extension with mpv. This allows you to right click on any sort of video link that youtube-dl supports and launch that link in mpv. mpv has a "stay on top" feature that can be enabled by default when mpv is invoked in this way. The result is picture-in-picture that supports virtually every video site on the net.
"I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard statements like the following.
Firefox crashes ten times a day for me.
I don’t understand how anyone can use it.
There’s a simple answer: for most people it doesn’t crash ten times a day. But the person making the statement hasn’t realized that what links the first sentence to the second is an assumption — that other people’s experiences are the same.", quoted from https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/01/02/yeinu-your-e...
I have some sympathy for those complaints: I've been using Firefox since 2004, but for whatever reason I can't use it on my lab computer. It's a ThinkPad t430 running windows 10, and on that machine Firefox will slow the machine to an absolute crawl even with only 3 tabs open. I spent an hour trying to diagnose it to no avail (I can't just install Linux, I have some serial hardware that is windows-only) before just giving up and switching to chrome.
However, this is the only time I've encountered this issue, and I tend to think it's more likely an issue with the windows installation than Firefox. I'm just too lazy to reinstall, this isn't my main computer after all.
I feel exactly the same when I read people saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome. It's been exactly the opposite for me and for everybody else I know on all kinds of computers and mobile phones.
I'm so used to scrolling by keypress (i.e. any of the vim-like extensions), with smooth scrolling disabled and a higher scroll step, that I just recently noticed that this reduces resource usage/heat.
Not sure if its representative, but I am extremely picky about framerates and jitter. On Ubuntu 19.10 Beta with Firefox 69.0.3 it feels noticeably faster than my Macbook.
It's smooth as butter on my early 2015 macbook air too. I suspect the issue is related to "retina" screens, which I don't have. (a 2009 mbp doesn't either iirc, right?)
Firefox is really dying compared to Chrome but I honestly think this is going to cause it to rebound.
People aren't going to be happy without uBlock and Ad Block...
Google has been REALLY dropping the ball in the last 2-5 years. What's a NEW Google product that you actually like (that they didn't acquire)?
They literally CAN NOT build new products that people like.
... all their hardware products suck. New things like Google Allo exist for like a year and then they are killed.
It seems like they give a half-assed attempt at creating new products as a way to keep skilled talent at Google rather than having them leave to work for Facebook or Apple.
They're actually DECENT at large acquisitions but that's the only thing that's saved them.
It's really a shame because Chrome is actually a GREAT browser but I won't use it without ad blocking.
I've already migrated to Firefox on my phone and it's been pretty great so far. It also supports extensions on mobile which is huge!
Not sure what you mean about Firefox dying; the software is the best it's ever been, relative to other browsers. The market numbers are still down though.
> Google has been REALLY dropping the ball in the last 2-5 years.
Nope, they're in the advertising biz now. They aren't so much "dropping the ball" as playing a ballgame (extremely well) that you dislike (because it's harmful and exploitative and destroys the tools you love).
They're just a new microsoft. Or since they're in a particular phase of that development, let's say a new M$. Embrace, extend, exploit.
> What's a NEW Google product that you actually like (that they didn't acquire)?... It seems like they give a half-assed attempt at creating new products as a way to keep skilled talent at Google rather than having them leave to work for Facebook or Apple.
What new products have Apple or, seriously?, Facebook created that you actually like?
Pretty sure people aren't leaving Google for Apple & Facebook because they want to build good new products.
The free unlimited high quality storage is great, but as someone who just switched to iOS after many years with Android, the implementation of folders/albums is REALLY poor compared to iCloud.
There's absolutely no mapping between folders and albums. If you sync your photos and don't organize them into albums manually every time, the folder structure is lost completely.
Pretty much all Android apps will only let you pick images from folders. There's usually an option buried in the hamburger menu to pick images from Google Photos, but you can only see ALL your photos lumped together, no option to choose from an album.
Sure, you can use the share feature in Google Photos, but that doesn't work if you need to use the image in a specific context, for example replying to a specific tweet.
With iCloud this all works seamlessly, my only gripe is that album order does not appear to be synced and even if I reorder them on my device, many apps appear to list albums in creation order. But overall it's still better.
Firefox also offers the Tree Style Tab extension. If you’re working with limited screen real estate (e.g., smaller laptop) it may not be ideal, but on a full-sized monitor browsing the internet without it feels downright antiquated.
My hierarchy of browsers looks like this. FF is my default, along with an extensive suite of security and privacy extensions including uBlock Origin. Very rarely, I’ll encounter an issue with a site, and I’ll fall back to Brave. Exceptionally rarely, I’ll fall back from Brave to Chrome, but I can’t remember right now the last time I needed to do that.
I’m really surprised no one is mentioning the new chromium-based MS Edge (still in Beta). They removed all the Google tracking and login nonsense, and it’s fast.
Edge Beta on macOS has been my daily driver (and dev browser) for a month (switched to it from Firefox, actually), and my only gripe is the extension story isn’t yet complete. The MS store only has a few extensions, and you have to jump through a couple of hoops to install from the Chrome store.
To be fair, that’s a bit of a false dichotomy when it comes to the new MS Edge (or any other modern browser, for that matter). It’s open source as well.
I used Firefox before Chrome and have tried to swap numerous times in the past (and have been using it for the last few weeks).
Advocates for Firefox often say "Firefox is better, just try switching!" yet when people point out reasons it's not better the response is "Oh those don't matter, you're just being nitpicky!"
But it's not a very gentle push back, it's forceful.
In this thread someone says "I don't like how much ram Firefox uses" and the response is
> I don't know why people choose their browser based on resource usage.
and
> Exactly. Come on, we're engineers we understand basic tradeoffs.
Firefox, as a product, has many issues when compared to Chrome. Why does everyone spend so much of their breath arguing against the real concerns and problems people have with it? Chrome has been getting worse in lots of major ways, Firefox has a chance to be the better product for a wider audience.
But Firefox won't become better with a culture of downvoting and arguing against criticism rather than trying to understand it. This is not the culture of Mozilla as far as I know, but it's the culture of many Firefox advocates all across the internet.
When I switched to Firefox from Chrome I certainly encountered some bumps in the road which almost caused me to go back. A few functionality gaps (I really the double-tap to zoom to a 'block' of content), but I think the biggest thing was that some of my day-to-day workflows couldn't be exactly replicated in Firefox.
Of course, now I'm used to Firefox, and my routine is centred on it - so now when I fire up Chrome, I have the same experience in reverse.
I don't think Firefox advocates should under-play the amount of time and disruption the shift to Firefox involves: but I do think it's worth doing. While there are a few things I miss, Firefox meets all my needs and more.
Clearly a lot of people like Firefox and enjoy Firefox.
The point of my comment is a lot of people have various real issues with Firefox that make them prefer Chrome and those people should be listened to rather than dismissed. The tone of Firefox advocates responding to critics is often aggressive and dismissive.
Even my comment, which says "Don't dismiss the critics!" is presently in the negative.
It's no skin off my nose if you want to feed Google, but personally I have no idea what you're talking about as there's never been something I couldn't do on firefox.
You don't have to feed Google though if you want to use a Chrome based browser. While probably not as safe as Firefox, there's privacy conscientious options such as Ungoogled Chromium, maybe even Brave if you're keen on the Chrome experience but also care about your privacy.
Arguing and downvoting is just how people and internet work. This has nothing to do with Mozilla culture. Rest assured the engineers of Mozilla are doing their best to make the product superior, independent of the principles difference.
Certainly it is how the internet work, but I always hope for a little bit better!
Generally I've written off arguing on the internet, but sometimes (like today) I slip up when it's too tempting to respond.
> Rest assured the engineers of Mozilla are doing their best to make the product superior, independent of the principles difference.
Even if it's obvious it is always nice to hear that an organization cares about doing the best job they can. I'm very appreciative of the work Mozilla is doing even if here I'm defending the critics of their work.
I also recognize your name from the massive contributions you're making to the Rust ecosystem. Thanks!
> Mozilla are doing their best to make the product superior, independent of the principles difference.
Last time I remember trying to discuss an issue in Firefox was when they dropped ALSA support and started requiring PluseAudio for sound. When people complained, a manager silenced everyone by locking the bug report. This was not surprising, as other problem reports in recent years have been met with similarly obstinate responses.
It's nice to think that at least some of their engineers are genuinely trying to improve things. (If you're one of them, thanks for trying!) It is nevertheless discouraging when problem reports are silenced by both the internet public and the company's own managers.
Sadly, the current situation is that both major browsers have made themselves deficient in one way or another. I manage to get things done by switching between them, but really, I'm ready to drop them both if a good alternative shows up.
For issues like ALSA/Pulse, at some point all the arguments have been heard and there is no point in letting people continue to spam Bugzilla with the same arguments repeated. At that point it makes sense to lock the bug report.
This is a pattern that shows up in other contexts as well. Linux on the desktop, git etc. have communities of advicates that tend to dismiss complaints and criticism far too strongly. That isn't to say that there are more reasonable people in these communities - there are plenty - but the forceful pushback is very visible and tends to be quite offputting.
Yes, those absolutely feel similar. It's a real shame because I think it holds back those communities and products enormously.
The person who takes the time to complain isn't an enemy, they're making an effort to bring something to attention for the community. You want more complainers instead of people silently rejecting your community and product.
The 'argue against the messenger' first reaction of many projects creates insular communities and insular communities create worse products.
I'm using Firefox for a while now (both on desktop and mobile) and I love it.
The only missing part for me on Android is that Firefox doesn't open native apps (YouTube, maps, Instagram etc..) when you open a link. The integration with built in apps like chrome has is not there.
That functionality is actually there. For any website that you visit where your phone also has an app to open those links in, a little Android head will appear in the address bar you and you can touch that to open with the app. Not intuitive really but it always works well once you get used to it.
I wish it was possible to configure Firefox for Android to automatically launch the native app instead of showing an Android head. It's one additional step that annoys me and slows me down, as it will needlessly load the page in Firefox instead of loading the content in the app.
Both of these features are available in YouTube on chrome if you pay for YouTube. I know paying for web services isn't something people like, but there it is.
Try long-clicking on a link to YouTube. If you have an appropriate app installed (either official YouTube or sth like Newpipe) the last item in the menu popping up should be sth like "open with $APP"
I highly recommend Firefox preview. It's really fast, no ads and trackers blocked without extensions. They also put the address bar at the bottom which is so much better.
It's really annoying. If you have a matching app installed there's an Android icon in the URL bar to open it in that app instead, but it's an extra step.
I'm glad it behaves like that because for me it's really annoying when the browser throws me out to another app (especially youtube, which is so much better with adblock in the browser).
Maps is the main app that I wish would open automatically. Each time someone shares a location with me or if I need to drive somewhere it's very lengthy to open the native app. Sometimes the address doesn't stick and I need to type it again.
There are some sites that don't work well in Firefox, like Cisco's WebEx. The web client will disconnect and reconnect causing everyone to constantly hear a disconnect and entry beep when your audio cuts out. On Chromium there is no problem on the same machine. This is on Xubuntu Linux.
I switched (back) to firefox after the quantum update and havent looked back. I haven't used chrome in years so im not able to compare performance but I've had nice issues in that department with ff. I use brave for mobile.
I see this all the time and I think it is unhelpful to make these kinds of statements. I can make a counterpoint that I've used FF on Android for years and never experienced any issues whatsoever. I am not trying invalidate your experience, but want to point out anecdotes don't really paint a fair picture for either side of the argument.
For example, how do we know my good experience and your bad experience are not easily explained by hardware differences? If so, what does that say?
But, the comment wasn't speaking in a generalization, just why they themselves don't use Firefox on Android while also indicating the exact device. It doesn't seem there was any argument being made, just that they seem a little disappointed that it doesn't work well on their specific device and they wanted to add that to the conversation.
Honestly, every bug/glitch/criticism is important, even if it doesn't affect a large portion of users. Ideally, it should be reported in Mozilla's bug tracker if it hasn't already, but still important nonetheless.
The feedback of "Android version of Firefox is unusably crashy on my phone" is not something any developer can take action on. There are no example sites, no steps to recreate. I agree it should be in the bug tracker, but adding anecdotes without specifics does not add much to the conversation nor does it help to move FF forward. Are we arguing all users of this specific device experience the same issues as this user? If not, not even the device model is helpful. As I pointed out, I was not trying to stifle feedback but to point out that for every "FF is too slow" complaint there are just as many "works fine for me comments" that are equally useless. How is FF slow, in what use cases, how cane we recreate these problems? That is worthy of a bug report and if that information is available submit it to FF to make the software better rather than complaining on a thread about Chrome removing a useful extension that FF supports fully across platforms.
All points I generally agree on, except that this isn't a discussion with Mozilla about improving Firefox. This is a discussion about Chrome that diverged into a discussion about Firefox in a very general manner. You may not be stifling feedback, but you're riding on the assumption that feedback is the purpose of the discussion going on, which it is not.
You keep bringing up this point about feedback that is irrelevant to the actual conversation at hand. Nitpicking feedback is kind of useless and pedantic when the purpose isn't to be feedback.
I've been a mostly FF user on Android for years and it does crash routinely for me, and also will do a thing where it doesn't crash but every page renders blank until I restart it. I've always assumed both items might be related to memory management either for graphics or in general.
I sent crashlogs with information on what I'm doing. This, not being the Firefox bug tracker, is not the place I'm going to post stacktraces and detailed discussion of the difficulty in reproducing the bug.
That's good to know, thanks. The descriptions I read only mentioned blocking ad trackers, not the ads themselves. If only I had known sooner. I'll have to correct my previous post: already switched.
No, I'm a BGA repair tech that has had to deal with the bad RAM chips on that model of phone, among others.
The RAM will appear to pass hardware checking in our testers, but you hit it hard and suddenly the frequency becomes unstable, often dropping down to DDR1 speeds. Plenty of room for error, there.
Ugh, I'd suspected something like that because it behaves very badly sometimes, but it's intermittent. Is there any recommended test for this? Or is it too ephemeral to test for?
You need a dedicated BGA removal/reflow tool (like a Metcal) a compatible RAM board to mount the removed BGA upon for insertion into a RAM tester, then you need a hardware RAM tester like RAMCHECK LX.
I switched to Firefox for Android after several attempts by DoubleClick to infect my device with malware. Funnily enough Chrome does ship with a setting which makes this kind of hijacking a lot harder. It was off by default and hidden in an obscure menu that wasn't accessible via the UI. Enabling it for everyone would probably lose them too much ad revenue I suspect.
I like Mozilla's principles in theory, but this warning from the user guide for GrapheneOS [1] (successor to CopperheadOS) is alarming, and applies to more than just Android:
> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox runs as a single process on mobile and has no sandbox beyond the OS sandbox. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux, where it can hardly be considered a sandbox at all) and lacks support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.
So, despite concerns about monoculture, I guess Chromium-based browsers other than Chrome are the most practical solution for now.
The Linux desktop Firefox sandbox is pretty strong AFAICT. All the usual namespace protection, pretty good seccomp filter. I wonder what the issue they're referring to is and whether that comment is up to date (the sandbox has improved a lot over the last few years).
The WebView argument is basically an argument for monoculture: you should only have one browser engine installed because that's less attack surface than two, and since Chromium must be installed for reasons, it must be Chromium. That's actually kind of a weak argument since it's not that common for users to load a specific attack in both browser engines.
So this is timely. I was just testing out something I'm working out that creates, uh.. A LOT of DOM elements. Original dev work was in Chrome and I went over to Win 10 to test other browers. I was COMPLETELY blown away by how much faster FireFox was at recomputing layout.
I tried several times to use Firefox as my default browser, but eventually I switched back to Chrome, due to some weird issues I got at some sites.
I still hate what Google is doing for Chrome and I'm now using a dual browser strategy... I use Firefox and Chrome at the same time, with a preference to Firefox.
I've been trying to do this but for some odd reason it's really slow on Mac. Been trying to figure out why but I don't see any solutions. Perhaps someone here knows.
If you're a vim user, try qutebrowser. It has some quirks, but with the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts and call upon scripts it's hard to move back to a "normal" browser.
Brave looks really cool, but it uses chromium so its hands are forever tied to google. I remember they considered Gecko but rejected it for some reason.
Only downside to Firefox mobile is its crummy tab management. Especially when browsing in landscape mode it takes an incredibly long swipe to dismiss a tab. I don't think I go a week without yelling "oh my God, go away!" at my phone after failing to close a tab after multiple tries.
Firefox with the containers extensions powers all of my browsing. In a bewildering turn of events, Microsoft Edge Dev powers my more intricate development needs.
Same here - FF for general web browsing and Microsoft Edge Dev for dev tooling on Windows. I haven't uninstalled Chrome completely yet but that day is quickly approaching.
Multiple-profile still has its advantage. Unfortunately it is pretty inconvenient to do so on Firefox now after the revamp (pre-57 there are plenty of extensions for that). It is much easier on Chrome, ironically.
It's great, a lifesaver if you will, imagine logging into two accounts simultaneously, when developing, the ability to do that is not only superficial, but essential.
Not only is it the default on Android, it is required by some apps, like gmail that all its links open in Chrome despite Firefox being default on my phone. It stinks of the monopolistic behavior MS was engaged in with IE back in the day.
If you go into Gmail's General Settings screen, you can uncheck "Open web links in Gmail". All the links I open in Gmail open directly in Firefox for me after doing that.
If I leave that box checked, it does use a web view that is "Powered by Firefox", but I always prefer to have it just open a new tab in my regular Firefox app.
Gmail link in Android open in a web view, but that view is powered by your chosen browser.
If you tap on the menu icon on the top right, it says "Powered by Firefox" if Firefox is your default browser.
All my Gmail links open with a "Powered by Firefox" view on my Android phone. I need to click through a menu to transfer it to a tab in Firefox app proper, but it's Firefox straight from Gmail.
The internet wasn't made for Google. And if you think it serves users very well too then I suggest you read TFA, it is clear that what is good for Google and what is good for users are not aligned.
I'm not talking from an idealist/paternalist point of view about what I think is good for users. I'm talking about letting users decide. And they seem to have decided, according to market share, that they like Chrome.
Yes, users could be clueless and be trading personal privacy unwittingly but that's not what I mean about "serves users very well". I meant users look at Chrome, Firefox and others and stick to Chrome. If they didn't like Chrome, they would switch.
Users have not 'decided', they've had something rammed down their throats that they might not have picked if not for some pretty obvious anti-competitive behavior by Google.
By your book might makes right, because Google was able to push users to convert in various ways - some of which should be or even are illegal - and it worked for them they must be delivering something that people need. But it wasn't a free choice.
It doesn't serve users in any sense that Firefox or another alternative can't. It's just been pushed so well by Google on all its devices and properties that users have been conditioned to think browser == Chrome.
I can't count the number of times that Google disingenuously suggested my internet experience would be better if I only switched to Chrome. A normal user confronted with an entity the size of Google with associated authority profile would have long ago switched.
When you develop a browser, one of the main concern of the users is to be able to import their passwords, bookmarks or tabs.
Guess what, Chrome for Android doesn't allow anyone to extract this data and bans apps who connects to their servers to fetch this information.
It's violating GDPR, but fuck the law when you have billions. Too big to jail.
>> Your item did not comply with the following section of our policy: An extension should have a single purpose that is clear to users.
Any speculation on what the supposed multiple purposes would be?
From past experience, is that type of thing something that is automatically flagged / determined programmatically or does a human reviewer of an extension make the call?
I mean you would think their process would be smart enough to say "Hey, we just rejected upload for product X that is THE MOST POPULAR PLUGIN. We haven't rejected any of the prior versions. Maybe let's get a human review.
Certainly google employees and the chrome team will be aware of this within an hour if they aren't already. You can bet it's intentional if we don't see a reversal in the next 3 days."
> I mean you would think their process would be smart enough to say "Hey, we just rejected upload for product X that is THE MOST POPULAR PLUGIN. We haven't rejected any of the prior versions. Maybe let's get a human review.
That’s the number of followers on github for the source code of the project not actual end users ..you will have to go their chrome web store page to see this .
For the love of all that is holy can people please read the actual linked post we are talking about. It's only ~twice as long as this comment section and even just looking at the screenshot at the end would explain the situation.
The number of GitHub followers isn't even close to 9000, you just assumed that rather than bothering to look at the actual page.
I have had similar rejections because my extension was asking for “broad host permissions”, however, the “https://*.<extension api domain>” was the only url we needed permission for, simply because that’s required for extension.
The “single purpose” extension part makes no sense to be honest. If the extension wants to provide a complete offline experience, you can’t do that. You need to split it into n different extensions and glue them together somehow.
And I won’t even start about the documentation which is basically 5 years in past. Some pages describe apis available, give you examples and then you realise it’s all deprecated!
Completely understand why uBlock maintainers aren’t keen to retry the submission.
I’ve switched to firefox for all the development flow, and treat Chrome as Second-Class citizen in this case by using “web-ext-polyfill” (thanks Firefox!) to get chrome extension work.
I switched to Brave a few months ago because I knew that Google would have done exactly a move like this. People should simply stop using Chrome because there's not a single good reason left to use it. Once upon a time it used to advertise its complete adherence to web standards, but nowadays it has now become the new IE when it comes to breaking them. And from now on it'll do everything not to harm Google's core business (i.e. ads revenue). And, unlike 10 years ago, there's plenty of comparable or better alternatives around.
That's good, for now. We'll have our own store with a better curation model, when we are a little bigger and depending on how harshly Google treats uBO and uMatrix.
time to bring out the anti-trust hammer and separate chrome and other google entities from the search and ad business. It really seems like they're asking for it.
I'm curious about something. I tend to be quite skeptical, so what is your view on corruption? For instance if I pay you $10 will you say the opposite thing and start supporting an even greater integration of these businesses and perhaps even bringing more Google entities into government funded institutions? Probably not. $100? $1,000? $1,000,000? You're going to change your tune quite rapidly. I think that everybody, for the most part, has a price. And it's generally quite low.
Last year Google's net income was $30,740,000,000. Put another way, 30,740 millions. Obvious of course but all these zeroes often let us lose intuition of just how stupidly much money this is. There are a total of 535 voting members in the US congress. And of course to ensure a company is safe it needn't get all 535 members, just a handful of key players sprinkled about would be more than enough. I'm also certainly not suggesting this is some shady cloak and dagger nonsense as I initially proposed to you; instead, simply a result of completely legal lobbying. I come to you with a presumably poignant pretty pleasant palatable power-point presentation - the undertone of our exchange needs not even be spoken. I, as a mega corporation, am simply looking for politicians that are 'doing the right thing.' You could get a transcript of our conversation and it'd be perfectly kosher. Leave office and, even though we already regularly chat, if you've been a good boy you stand to get paid $400,000 for 30 minute chats, over and over. Got a loser son? You know I think he just has a lot of untapped potential. We're always looking for executive advisors that can offer unique perspectives - pay's about half a million per year.
I find it difficult to find any other explanation for the state of business today. The behaviors of companies today are vastly more anticompetitive than those of companies in times past, an increasingly distant past, when the government actually did anything. The difference seems to be that modern companies have just become vastly larger, and they're increasingly interweaving with government. I wonder if this is analogous to how people felt in the days before the separation of church and state.
Out of every company in tech, Google has made my life fantastic.
I don't understand the Google hate, I don't know where it comes from. People don't like getting relevant advertising, but they do like when Apple closes off their App store 'for safety'.
I don't know why the double standard. I personally think this is a massive advertising campaign from one of the FAANG companies and we are the tools that discuss it.
> I don't understand the Google hate, I don't know where it comes from.
Surveillance, advertising, bloat, ever worsening UX of their software, random product shutdowns, random bans & lack of human support to resolve false positives. I could go on.
What people like is software that lets them accomplish what they need unobtrusively. People like Apple's store to the extent it doesn't let garbage and adware in. But people also dislike Apple for not allowing sideloading.
I like Google search as well, and I'll look at a bunch of ads on it if I have to, but I don't see the logical connection here how that implies we need to tolerate bad standards in web browsers or the android platform. Spin-off ads and search from android and chrome and search will be just as great and we don't need to infest web standards with rules that only exist to serve the ad business.
I don't practise any double standard here either. Same goes for apple. If they use their app store to stop competition by for example Spotify to promote apple music, break that up as well. The same thing for amazon, if they use AWS money to price dump on eCommerce or disadvantage third-party sellers, break it up.
I don't have any favourites here, whenever one of these companies engages in activity that is clearly bad for the ecosystem just for their own benefit I would like to see a very rapid and proactive response.
Or maybe HN needs an autosuggest function, something similar to what SO has? "These news were posted recently and match yours pretty closely, are you sure you want to post another one?"
I didn't see a mention of this, but a review of the changes since the last accepted version shows 2 things: a bunch of description text changes mostly for character escaping and the hiding of one bar graph.
slow clap that's some dangerous stuff you're blocking there Google.
Are the gsuite components distributed through the CWS?
I’m rather disturbed that on HN of all places not a single comment is talking about anything other than going to another browser. Google should fix this, and there should be plenty of people here who can voice it internally.
I really hope this is Chrome shooting their selves in the foot. Like a fool I am using Chrome as I type this, my excuse is Chrome has my banking numbers saved and haven't taken the 2 seconds to enter it into firefox so it is ready and convenient. But if I can't use an adblocker and if I don't have control over what runs on my hardware then kiss me goodbye. I will finish the switch today and uninstall Chrome.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for the last year or so; it's certainly improved a lot. Something that can help this transition is the bang support [0], with `!g` prefixed to your query. This redirects you to google with same query if you find that the results are not satisfactory. I used to use it a lot, but I've found I've needed it a lot less lately.
I recommend using `!s` instead, which will use Startpage instead of Google. But, since Startpage actually uses Google for search results in a private manner (similar to DDG using Bing and Oath/Yahoo), you'll get the same results as Google, but privately like DuckDuckGo.
Since !bangs are just using the URL search scheme of the site you're trying to search, it's just redirecting you to Google when you use !g, which allows Google to set cookies and use trackers. By using !g, one is sort of defeating the purpose of using DDG, so that's why I always like to recommend using Startpage and !s as a fallback instead.
Now is the best time too since Google is getting so terrible, not returning any decent websites for the search terms entered, ignoring keywords, returning what it thinks I want or what's good for google instead of returning what I'm looking for.
90% of the time I search something, I already know what website I'm looking for. For instance when I searched for "Monaco Grand Prix" a few minutes ago, I already knew the result I wanted was the wikipedia page about it. So instead of searching on google "Monaco Grand Prix wiki" I searched in the firefox address bar "wiki Monaco Grand Prix". Wiki is my search keyword for "search this on wikipedia".
By creating search keywords for my 5-10 most common sites to search things on, I have eliminated the majority of the searches I would have otherwise sent to a general purpose search engine.
Just to add, there are a few websites that have horrible search engines, like Reddit, so I do the same, but use my primary search engine's URL scheme specifying which site to limit the search to. For example, if I wanted to use "reddit" to have Google search Reddit instead of Reddit itself, I'd use something like:
Of course, you can use any search engine you want, such as DDG. You just have to figure out the URL scheme for limiting the search to a specific domain and include it in the search URL when adding it to Firefox (or any other browser that lets you manually add search engines and keywords).
This was pretty inevitable, given the recent changes announced to Chrome that Google created to fight ad blockers. Why would they limit their fight to just that?
If you have to use Chromium, at this point it is clear that Brave is a better Chromium than Chrome [0][1] despite its BAT shenanigans. The UX is super nice, and adblocking just works without having to install any extensions. Hopefully Brave doesn't buy into the whole PrivacySandbox thing Google proposed [2].
For everything else, Firefox should be the default [3][4].
It'd be great if Firefox bundles a content blocker like uBlockOrigin [5] in its distributions and introduces First-Party Isolation [6]. DoH is a welcome addition, esp since it can be used with AdGuard DNS [7] for another layer of content blocking. Firefox Private Network [8] is yet another step in the right direction, as are the anti-fingerprinting techniques [9] it has been upstreaming from the Tor Browser. With WASM around the corner, it'd be wonderful when native apps could be run from within a privacy-friendly sandbox like Firefox. Imagine using WhatsApp/Instagram on Android within Firefox with content blockers...
Next up: Strike partnerships with Android OEMs and bundle the browser as default.
> It'd be great if Firefox bundles a content blocker like uBlock Origin in its distributions
No thanks. Firefox is a great web browser platform. Instead, it should focus on improving web extension apis, allowing users to build their own extensions upon it.
Whenever Google pushes out the manifest v3 changes, ad blocking on Chrome will be hobbled. uBlock Origin already stated they are dead on Chrome whenever that happens.
Same. Plus, even with Brave, you'd still need to install the latest uBO from github, so there's no benefit aside from "I hate Google but I'll still use a fork of their open source browser"
uBO is a wide-spectrum blocker, not merely an adblocker. It has powerful context-sensitive blocking that's surpassed only by uMatrix (also from gorhill), as well as cosmetic filters that I find invaluable for cleaning up the dumpster fire being passed off as "the web" these days.
Floating header bar that follows you down the page of an article you're trying to read, wasting your vertical screen space? Remove it permanently with uBO's cosmetic filters and never see it again. Tired of the sidebar with links to clickbait articles on the site? Cosmetic filter. Wikipedia nagging for donations despite a history of irresponsible spending and ample cash reserves? Cosmetic filter.
We don't have uBO's cosmetic filters. That's about it.
In other words, Brave is "wide-spectrum" too. We block tracking, fingerprinting, and other bad scripts -- not ads _per se_. This has the effect of blocking 3rd party ads and most 1st party (since 1st party ads still rely on tracking "pixels" AKA scripts for confirmation).
We don't block 1st party ads by default where they work without tracking cookies and scripts. A prime example are the search ads you find on Google and other search engine result pages. These are about as clean as you can get, and yet some of our users want to block them on principle, for aesthetic reasons, etc. So we are adding options to do so.
Cosmetic filters have a high performance cost that we have not been willing to take by default, but we're working on them.
They were using Mixpanel before, but they got complain from users, so eventually they added a proxy in front of Mixpanel (but that doesn't change anything since Mixpanel generates an UID, so what's the point of hiding the IP ?).
It's used for tracking user performance when distributing BAT (otherwise you would have no referral program possible), that's how they distributed the initial 5 USD
That was for the website, not for browser telemetry -- we switched to self-hosted Piwik (now Matomo) instance.
For in-browser telemetry, please see https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/. Low-dimensionality data (a few bits of answer) given to randomly timed unlinkable survey questions; anything hi-D is in the future and will use PROCHLO.
Why would Firefox block Google ads or Google trackers by default ?
It doesn't make sense, it's their almost only source of revenue (>500 million of USD).
Why would Firefox block Google’s ads on Google’s own site? That’s not what Firefox’s tracking protection is about. Firefox protects people from third-party tracking, it’s not an ad blocker.
If a website wants to show its own ads -- let’s call them first-party ads -- then Firefox is completely fine with that; and so it every other browser, including Brave.
"BAT shenanigans": https://batgrowth.com/ -- this is already bigger than alternative micropayment-like schemes. It's opt in and will remain so for our default builds. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Quote: "Since the next uBO release will essentially be what 1.22.5rc2 is, consider that uBO is probably coming to an end of life in the Chrome Web Store -- there is no good reason to believe uBO 1.22.5rc2 would no longer be rejected with only changing the version number to 1.23.0.
Those who still want to use uBO will have to find another browser for which uBO will still be available."
Hell yeah, Brave or Firefox. I dumped Chrome half a year ago, switched to Firefox and DuckDuckGo. I love my uBO + NoScript + PrivacyBadger extensions on Firefox.
It's probably a good thing long term. Tech savvy folks will leave Chrome behind like we did with IE. It will encourage alternatives and the web and browsers might get exciting again!
I'm using Firefox Developer Edition as my main browser, but anytime I have to work with the Google ecosystem I use Vivaldi - and I only use it for that.
Compare this with GNU/Linux distribution model, from the developer PoV. It's so nice, compared to this arbitrary arrogant gatekeeper non-sense that happens with Google/Apple/...
You write a useful app, publish it on your own web page, and distributors will actually come to your website, check the app, review it, build it for you, even for multiple archs sometimes, and distribute it via worldwide network of mirrors. There are even many competing distributions, so no single one has power to exclude you, users can download your app from your website and use it too, etc. Nobody will be able to stop them.
For projects where there's no money in distribution, like those mentioned here, it's like a developer heaven.
And next time someone will talk to me about how fragmentation in the Linux distribution ecosystem is bad, and that there are too many distributions, etc... I'm really glad there are, because if alternative is this amount of power accumullated in single hands, and this kind of behavior, then that is not desirable.
"Hey all, I'm Simeon, the developer advocate for Chrome extensions. This morning I heard from the review team; they've approved the current draft so next publish should go through. Unfortunately it's the weekend, so most folks are out, but I'm planning to follow up with u/gorhill4 with more details once I have them."
It's about time Mozilla to release FF with nightly macOS optimizations and I'm ready to switch on all platforms I use.
I moved from Safari back to Chrome week ago, because Apple basically did same thing - killed uBlock in Safari 13. I was expecting to move to FF soon or later, but didn't expect it will be in less than a month. :)
If that's the hill chrome wants to die on then they can watch everyone install Firefox. The internet is unusable without an adblocker. It's very simple to just use Firefox, I've had no negative differences or learning curves from it, and previously would just swap between the two.
One of the main "advantages" (for Google) of manifest v3, is that there is, not only a blacklist, but also a whitelist of domains bundled with Google Chrome.
So the logic is to restrict adblockers, to use the internal Chrome adblock so Google can decide what ads are acceptable or not.
An independent study shows that YouTube ads and Search Ads are the ones that the users enjoy the most and wouldn't want to block ;)
>An independent study shows that YouTube ads and Search Ads are the ones that the users enjoy the most
People enjoy Youtube ads the most? That's surprising to me given that they're rather intrusive and they get between you and the content you actually want to see.
everything that distracts or sends signals that have nothing to do with the intent of the user for visiting a site in the first place is an anti-pattern. I block all ads and even obstrusive elements using custom styles or UBO cosmetic filters...
This shows especially well in older generations who are not very used to the information overflood and competition for attention on the internet. Mixing legitimate content with ads is the craziest pattern on the internet by far; and in untrained users -- most of the older ones -- this causes confusion, frustration and finally exhaustion with the medium.
We who are used to this are just the internet user version of Pavlov's dogs.
Hopefully despite Google's fuckups about uBO, there will still be a way to load this on Brave even after it stops being available for Chrome. Chrome's speed on my 2012 mac is still faster than any build of Firefox and Safari is just not as good.
Yes, we said we will keep webRequest extensions working even when Google kills them (except for paying enterprise customers who group-admin some into a whitelist).
Over the past few years, it's become normal for a tiny number of people at a tiny number of companies to make decisions about which software packages ordinary people can run on devices that they own. When this practice started, a few people, myself included, said it would lead to a dark place. We were ignored. Can we revisit this decision now? As a general principle, if you own a device, you should be able to override any west-coast meeting room and run any package you want on it. If necessary, we should guarantee this freedom with legislation. The alternative is an inevitable shift toward banning things that this tiny group of software supervisors finds inconvenient.
"Important Note Repeated or egregious violations of the policies may result in your developer account being banned from the store. This may also result in the suspension of related Google services associated with your Google account."
Google is into all these different services and wants them all managed from one Google ID. But if you have a problem with one of their services, it can screw you on all of their services.
Why this constant painful guessing game? Why don't they just tell you what they detected you did wrong? What portion of our society is broken that does not allow for this?
Well, “de facto” monopoly doesn’t mean anything in the eyes of the law. That’s what de jure means Despite what HN posters believe, the definition of a monopoly isn’t “a company that is big and does things I don’t like”.
Also according to your own citation.
Under the Sherman Act monopoly power is considered the ability of a business to control a price within its relevant product market or its geographic market or to exclude a competitor from doing business within its relevant product market or geographic market.
Where in that act does it say anything about “banning an ad blocker”? It specifically mentions “price”. Are we going to say that the government can tell businesses what is allowed in its own store?
De facto means something in the eyes of the law. Where did you get it from that it doesn't?
> Are we going to say that the government can tell businesses what is allowed in its own store?
Yes, we definitely are. If there's a monopoly and the monopolist is blocking people from participating, of course we can get the courts involved. Just google all the antitrust cases about Microsoft, Google and Apple, among others.
Re: "price", even if there's no monetary exchange, other goods are being exchanged (personal information, ads, etc).
Oh yeah, there have been antitrust cases against companies for not distributing software in their store. Despite HN posters opinions, Apple a monopoly isn’t defined by a company not distributing software they want - whether it be Apple or Google.
Doesn't mean that Chrome isn't a monopoly, with their current marketshare, if Chrome introduces a new feature or changes how some feature works, all competitors have no choice but to implement that change or websites stop working.
That's not really how it worked pre-2010 when IE had the monopoly.
And for all of Chrome (and Google's) faults, it does seem to be reasonably standards- compliant and even open to experimentation. If they want to spend some of their piles of cash developing new features that other browsers can then adopt and then standardise, I don't see the problem.
If developers choose to use Chrome-only features and their pages break on other browsers, that's on them
When IE had a monopoly it was bad because Microsoft made a shitty webbrowser and everyone built websites for IE.
Even today I have devices which are "best viewed on IE6", thanks to modern browsers they still tend to work somewhat.
Chrome will not be bad because it's a shitty browser, it'll be bad because Google can force features into standards and essentially do what they want with no recourse.
It's not the developers fault directly but they inherently support an abusive vendor-user relationship.
Everyone who doesn't see that is just a Google-apologist.
And again, that's what Google is already doing, I'm not saying they're doing the exact same things that happened with IE1-8 but a browser monopoly is still equally bad regardless of how badly a browser is maintained.
Oh, absolutely - I'm not arguing in favour of browser monopolies. I'm saying that browser standards aren't a popularity contest. You can have the most popular browser in the world but still not be able to strongarm your way into compliance. Remember attachEvent?
Well, those are to some extend exceptions, if a browser has major marketshare, then any change implemented will have to be implemented by others. Google doesn't have to stop implementing them at all, no matter the response from devs.
You will by definition be standards compliant if you are the main mover behind the eternally moving standard. Chrome powers the living standard. Other browser engines follow.
They cooperate for now, but the balance of power and momentum is heavily in favour of Google as it stands. This will only matter when one of the others wants to hold out on some critical feature and find that they effectively can't if they don't want to see their already minor market share plummet. Apple though do have some clout since they own the entire vertical...
So we have gone from Google powering the living standard to the prediction that they will be able to dominate it at some hypothetical point in the future.
Well, maybe. Who's to say? But if we're theorising, I'd say that Google probably learnt a lot from IE's demise and most likely sees the advantage of making sure that the web dev community at least does not actively hate them.
I thought we were talking about other browsers "wanting to hold out on some critical feature and finding that they effectively can't if they don't want to see their already minor market share plummet"?
Which is kind of a weird thing to be arguing for anyway. If a company wants to innovate isn't that a good thing?
There was a brief time when IE and FF were about even. Around the time when a lot of developers just gave up and stopped supporting IE6 and IE's reputation never really recovered (and rightfully so).
Shortly after, Chrome hit the lead and never looked back.
Flash was already falling out of favour as html5 emerged, making it irrelevant.
iPads and iPhones were influential in the birth of the mobile-first philosophy but not in the decline of IE.
IE never really set standards, in fact the big complaint about it always was how non- compliant it was.
Of course the government didn't kill IE. It died because of arrogance and short sightedness.
Flash was all the rage until people started browsing more on mobile. Not only was Flash “not out of favor” when the iPhone was introduced, it was a big talking point that Flash didn’t run on iPhones and later iPads. It was a marketing point that Android could run Flash (badly) until everyone just gave up.
There were definitely a lot of flash sites around back in the day. But anyway, flash support/popularity had nothing to do with IE losing control of setting browser standards because IE never set browser standards in the first place - in fact it quite often flouted them.
I’m saying that IE and Flash’s popularity didn’t decline because of government intervention - the tool that seems to be the go to of HN posters anytime there is something that they don’t like - even though what ended IE and Flash’s popularity on the web wasn’t the government.
Well being that I was talking about IE pre-2010 I guess the next step would be to reminisce... maybe hope not to repeat the mistakes of the past? What do you suggest?
In the EU having a monopoly doesn't require you to be the only vendor in the market, it's sufficient to be large enough to exert abusive market forces on competitors. Google Chrome definitely fits that definition, so no it's not redefined by random HN posters this week.
Google is certainly not a corporation that has ever shown to have an interest in the best for their users. They have already done quite a few things that benefit them or hurt competitors (youtube's UI is slow on firefox, changing the scrolling UI for no reason, trying to kill adblockers and now blocking uBlock from their store).
Google is no different than any other for profit corporation. Their first interest is making money by getting their customers to pay them. Their customers are advertisers. Their users are what they sell to their customers.
And that’s fine. But anytime HN users start whining “monopoly” the next thing they start screaming is for government to intervene every time that Google/Apple/Amazon doesn’t something that they don’t like.
If you’re into having a more privacy-by-default Conscious browsing experience I strongly suggest you try Brave. It’s awesome and for 6+ months all my work and home stuff and chrome plugins have worked flawlessly in it (all I had to google was how to enable chromecast). It’s fast, delightful, private, low battery consumption!
Would it be possible to create a desktop app that acted as a third party chrome extension store? Chrome let's you installed developer zip files without needing approval, could you make a desktop app that automatically downloaded the latest version and uploaded it to all devices as a zip file in chrome?
This is truly unfortunate. So much of life today involves using the web, it's disheartening that there are so few usable web browsers anymore (and before someone chimes in, Firefox broke their PKI functionality sometime in the last two years or so, so it's a non-starter).
Chrome has always been best as a Google client. You can browse Maps in it, use Google Apps, they always work well.
For regular browsing it had some nice security features but always lacked an equivalent to Tree Style Tabs. And will soon become useless without a decent ad blocker.
Unfortunately it has created an Internet Explorer effect, and weekly there is a site I need to load into Chromium because they never tested their JS on FF. Hopefully FF picks up user share and that begins to change again.
Firefox is a superior product and has been for a few years now even discounting all these shenanigans by Google. I urge anyone who is still on Chrome to switch.
Mozilla has a lot of employees focused on making a libre browser. Instead of wasting time on the Gecko sinking ship, they should really be maintaining a fork of Chromium without the cancer. The world isn't any better off because you can't get over a massive sunk cost. What the world needs is a free Chromium fork (with all the Mozilla integrations like sync and the addons) that is professionally maintained for widespread use.
Pi-hole is a basically a glorified DNS filter. While it's great for blocking DNS names across all devices on your network, it is not a replacement for browser plugins like uBlock Origin.
Pi Hole is a very poor substitute for uBlock origin, it doesn't block Youtube or Twitch ads for example or do anything dynamic. Plus it's full of false positives since DNS rules can be very coarse or change continuously. Not to mention the trouble you have to go to when sites break due to that coarseness or that in many cases it degrades functionality that's not immediately obvious.
uBlock origin is the king of adblocking, and suffers from none of these issues. Use anything else and you're severely compromising. I'd go as far as to say that DNS adblocking is basically a waste of resources, a gimmick, the wrong solution to a well-defined problem.
You make good points but it sounds very silly to claim DNS adblocking is a waste of resources. One, to each his own. Two, no false positives in our home and 10%-15% of DNS queries blocked is definitely not the "wrong solution" for me and many, many others. Why trivialize legitimate use cases to make your point.
Furthermore, you can't install ublock origin on IoT devices and smart TV's so your claim of "waste of resources" is even more questionable.
Better still, why not both pihole and ublock origin?
It's actually not better than nothing. It's worse than nothing, because it gives a false sense of security.
Bypassing DNS blocking is easy. You can access my normal site, block ads by DNS, but I can just serve everything up over plain IP address without the domain name being required, now you're loaded with ads/trackers/scripts anyways and your security just got bypassed.
This trick is literally as old as HOSTs. It has been proven time and time again that DNS-based blocking only works when everything uses domain names as pointers to resources, instead of using IP addresses to do the same.
It feels like APK has suddenly arrived on HN. Not a surprise since we just had him banned off Slashdot.
Google is a villainous monstrosity. Maybe these sort of events will finally wake the tech crowd up to this since it personally affects them. Dear US/EU gov: BREAK UP GOOGLE.
Why don't you supply a link so the community can make up its own mind, rather than having you frame the story for them? To judge by what you just posted, it sounds like your earlier posts have been breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which would explain why users flagged them and/or mods moderated them.
HN's standard is clear: this is a site for intellectual curiosity. Everything else follows. It isn't for flamewars, and while some political overlap is inevitable, comments must be thoughtful and substantive. Using the site primarily for political battle is not allowed, nor is flamebait (nationalistic flamebait in particular), and you can't take a thread off on inflammatory tangents, as you just did with this comment here. (I detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233229 and marked it off-topic.)
Does that mean HN is or isn't "some sort of open discussion space where critical questioning is allowed"? That depends on how you define that. If by "open" you mean open to arbitrary flamewar, HN is not. Such discussion spaces destroy themselves pretty quickly, so it's not clear how "open" they remain in the long run anyhow. HN's goal, from the beginning, has been not to destroy itself in this way.
"Since the next uBO release will essentially be what 1.22.5rc2 is, consider that uBO is probably coming to an end of life in the Chrome Web Store -- there is no good reason to believe uBO 1.22.5rc2 would no longer be rejected with only changing the version number to 1.23.0.", https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/745#iss...
I hope, that Google will not put pressure on Mozilla to do same thing - remove uBlock Origin from Firefox extensions, since they still have leverage on Mozilla - hefty amounts for being first in their search list. Not sure if Mozilla is able to survive without Google (but hope they can).
Honestly, Google's (and general tech giants') willingness to let people's lives be caught in the cracks of their algorithms in their pursue for scalability scares me more than any ideology they could push.
More and more, we're seeing developers and content creators being banned or demonetised, people being shadowbanned from dating apps that represent a majority of your chances to find a significant other, and so on.
I think we need legislation to deal with these issues: people subjected to punishment should be able to know the rules they're being subjected to, the way they supposedly broke those laws, and have a non automated chance to contest the ruling. Even if these businesses aren't public property, when they represent an almost monopolistic chance to get the service they provided they should be treated as if they are.