As Google Chrome disables uBlock Origin and other unsupported extensions, rivals like Brave and now Opera have confirmed they will support it. The latter has explained how it hopes to do so.
I've been using a chromebook for the last 4 years and it's been great for my needs (youtube, streaming, porn, etc), but I am shopping for a windows machine now because fuck google.
I'm not too familiar with chrome books, i know some of them are insanely locked down to prevent this.. but see if theres a linux distro compatible with your chromebook, and if its possible to slap a linux install on it.
I used to work for an ad heavy mobile game and ad serving company couple of years ago, and I had ad blocking at dns level in my house. It blocks not only ads, but also most tracking and telemetry. My bosses wanted to know why my devices were not displaying ads or dialing back to home, they were pretty fucking puzzled. They were terrified others like me were around. Basically their entire business model depends of people not knowing how to block ads and telemetry
I didn't other than for testing, in fact I had to research and figure out ways to bypass ad blockers, to prevent social icons from being blocked etc. I even wrote that company a brand new admin website to replace their old one, they liked it so much that they laid me off a few months later even though they were already underpaying me because they wanted someone cheaper to maintain it, after announcing they had record-breaking year-over-year profits. I found a 30% higher paying job a few months later and been there since. lol
You won't get me off adblock, as of recently i've come to find we get significantly more ads compared to friends and family.
My dad plays wordfeud, so i install and play a set with him...about 5 seconds in i get frustrated at the 4th ad and my dad goes: "which ads".
My friends keep telling me i'm taking the youtube ads far too serious as they are only 10 seconds and show it to me too.
My youtube ads are 1 minute unskippable blocks before and after 1m 51s videos. I'll get a 1min ad block halfway into a 5 minute video even though youtube themselves claim they don't do that.
How the fuck am i so fucked when it comes to ads, my dads phone is almost completely ad free. Heck the google top suggestions that are basically paid for ads don't even show up on his phone.
He can play those free apps (advertisement feeding software) without getting any ads and he's adamant his phone isn't modified.
It's with all those silly free apps tho, sometimes i'll go there and have some fun game which he installs on the spot...no ads.
So it can't be with the apps itself.
Heck i've burned myself on a couple of those games where i would go: "i've played for weeks, might as well buy out the ads and save myself the headache" and it will still have ads, for power ups or some other similar things.
Eh, I haven't seen an ad on YouTube for years, I just use uBlock Origin on Firefox and they're all gone. You can also do that on mobile as well.
That said, I use Grayjay on mobile because it eliminates ads and also lets me sub to videos from other platforms. I have a few subs from Odyssee, one from Rumble, and a half dozen or so from Nebula. None of them display ads, and I only occasionally have some weird issue where a video doesn't load (usually just close and re-open the video and it works).
The DNS option is nice if you use an app that you don't have any control over, but for videos and regular web browsing, you can just use an ad-blocker.
Opera browser? The one that everyone was making a stink about a few years ago? The one owned directly by a Chinese based company, and was supposedly sending telemetry to China?
I stopped using Opera the second it wasn't Norwegian.
I use Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile and Vivaldi as the "clean" browser when something k. Waterfox/Librewolf fucks up an important webpage I have to use
People are still using it thanks to them forcing (ig sponsors from yt videos) and appealing to young generations with the opera gx browser and Twitter account mostly.
With the regular browser I assume they got it by accident while downloading adware(this might have happened to gx).
It seems that many people here are not aware of how much Mozilla depends on Google, so switching to them is a small consolation. Maybe it's time to support the development of new engines like Servo and Ladybird more. Servo even recently released an Android version (currently not very usable, but I downloaded it just to show support).
Sure, but it is still the most usable alternative we have for now. I would avoid stock FF and use either Librewolf or hardened FF because the default browser spies too.
Of course, I also use LibreWolf, Mull... but we expose ourselves to security risks this way (as is currently happening with Firefox and Mull), and besides that, you have to trust projects more and more whose code is not reviewed as thoroughly.
Basically, owned by a Chinese company and based on Chromium. If you need something based on Chromium, I recommend Brave since it has a built-in ad-blocker. I use it as a backup, and it works well for the odd page that doesn't work in Firefox. That said, I recommend Firefox or one of its forks over anything Chromium based.
Just use Firefox and its variants for more privacy. Done. Chromium is a dead road. Even with ungoogled chromium , brave , etc you have to trust the maintainers and their compiled version.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn't make a single dent in Chromium's dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.
That's true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend's house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend's been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.
What's that? What? What's with the ads? Oh that, that's YT.
I know it is, but what's with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them...
Installed adblocker for him, he's looking at it in shock. I'm looking at him shocked...
Yes I agree. If you are using adblocker you are already not an average user. Using A
adblocker with custom filters put you on the extreme end and most of those users are either already on FF or have migrated to FF since the MV3 announcement.
And let's not forget adblock made for MV3 will work well enough for those users who aren't using adblocker with custom filters.
Even if Google kill off adblock completely with its browser, chrome will still be dominating the market by a huge margin.
Google makes money on ads. They think they can force more money to make. People switching to Firefox makes that a wasted effort for Google as you descibed.
At absolute most, they risk losing the portion of users who use ad blockers because of this decision. They'll certainly lose less, but are practically guaranteed to not lose more.
They probably determined that the additional ad revenue from those who used to use ad blockers was more than the revenue they'd lose from people leaving.
I don't agree with it, but I bet that's happening here. Personally, I'd be surprised if 20% or more of Chrome users have an ad blockers installed. Even fewer would use Revanced or the like.
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
Opera Browser (before it was sold to a Chinese company) did have its own browser engine before it went Chromium. It was called Presto. source. The team that used to own/run Opera before the sale to China formed again to make the Vivaldi browser.
Vivaldi and Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 addons (like uBlock Origin) until July 2025. The article doesn't say how long Opera will continue, but I'm guessing its the same deadline of July too.
Opera, being owned by Chinese big tech is probably the only "mainstream" browser I find worse than Chrome and I doubt it will have any measurable effect on Googles market dominance. Don't get me wrong Google would absolutely deserve to trip and fall for the enshittification route they're taking, but I don't see how Opera could do what Firefox can't when Opera is very reliant on Google.
I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera's move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote it.
I know I’m a drop in the bucket but I have always been a diehard Google fanboy and, in the recent years, have switched to iOS, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. No regrets.
Unfortunately, I doubt it. Chrome made it as big as it did because it had one of the biggest tech and advertising companies in the world behind it. Other than Microsoft with building in Internet Explorer into Windows, thereor Apple doing that with Safari, isn't anything else that could compete as easily, and we all how that went for Microsoft.
And it would only be harder today, since they'd not only have go contend with Chrome, but also that a lot of websites are being built around Chrome/browsers using the Chromium engine. People would go to a website that either refuses to work, or doesn't work properly for their browser and hop over to Chrome instead.
Netflix requires specific DRM addons that are really only available for the major browser engines, as an example. If someone is rolling their own, like KDE does, then that's going to refuse to work outright.
They explain nothing. They're in the same boat as all others: open source will let them keep MV2 longer than mainstream chrome, but that future is uncertain as the main project codebase starts to evolve around MV3 and backward compatibility to hack MV2 back in gets lost over time. Nobody here can make promises, and sites that make that make those judgments are naive.
Doesn't even matter since it is a Chinese browser.
Anyway, the only way to potentially save the www, is to massively take away market share for Chromium based browsers. And unfortunately I doubt this will happen. Since last year, Chrome market share went up, while Firefox market share went down. People are clearly too stupid to make their own fucking decisions.