ublock origin lite, the natural replacement but not automatically enabled by google or microsoft. you have to go get it. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home
an alternative is adguard’s browser extension. it is free to use and open source (gpl). https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardBrowserExtension#installation
firefox became bloated so switched to chrome because faster/better. back to firefox last year. too old to keep fighting ads. thinking off button will be next. yeah addons mostly work
What’s “bloated” about Firefox?
that’s how I remember switching to chrome in the 00s. it had become unstable.
Distant past. Few of us recall.
I remember! 2.0 to 3.0 switch wherethe GUI slowed down dramatically. 2.0 felt like driving a sports-car.
nobody ever seems to detail what kinda bloat they mean when they say that, i don’t think they actually thought about it that deeply. nobody complains about anything specific like XUL support, for example.
In my experience, there was a period when Firefox crashed all over the place, especially under heavy load. Tabs shared the same process back then, one tab could take down whole the browser session when crashed. I vividly remember how it felt so silky when i switched to chrome. Now I am back to Firefox since 3 years. Firefox is the sexier now with all the shiny addons
Maybe in like Firefox 4 days
Yeah Firefox was kind of a hog around 2013. I have a netbook that I’ve kept around since like 2014 and I remember when I first got it, it couldn’t really run Firefox. Firefox would freeze up and crash. Funily enough today Firefox runs better on that 2014 netbook than chrome does.
I also had a high end gaming PC at the time and Firefox always ran fine as long as you had the reaources to run it.
Well, that was 2011, so…
I guess right before Firefox Quantum?
It was back before enshittification of the internet, when things were better. Was just big and clunky, chrome came along and ran very fast, until last few years, they swapped places.
When will people switch away from Chrome to other browsers? I get it, Chrome sets the standards and it’s hard to switch away from them, but it’s necessary to ensure the survival of the Internet.
They wouldn’t set the standard anymore if nobody used them.
I doubt most people even know you can change it. Edge is the default browser on windows. Chromium. Chrome is the default browser on android (though I suppose Samsung has a custom browser and they’re the main android device people are buying)
Ugh, any Samsung app is equivalent to internet explorer. Gross
A lot sooner than you think hopefully
I still rock NoScript. It helps avoid drive-bys and other silliness. It does take patience though so I get why not many like it.
The transition away from Manifest V2 is a good example of how changes made by major platforms can have a huge impact on developers and users. I’m curious to see how this affects privacy-focused and specialized browser extensions over the long term.
Edge will soon follow. They announced it. Polly will switch to helium or brave
People need to stop using brave
People are not looking this deep into switching browsers lol.
They should tho
Or better yet LibreWolf
Or better yet LibreWolf
I cannot count how many things I had to change in settings to get the browser to just work right, I mean I appreciate them locking everything down to the nth degree but… damn. Finally switched to waterfox, the out of the box experience is a lot friendlier.
I get the frustration. It could have a tutorial / wizard to make it easier to set and understand.
If some parts are not loading, check the top left of the address bar for some icons, by default LibreWolf blocks canvas and anything that can identify you, and you have to press on them to allow them to render the elements.
Security unfortunately implies more inconvenience, which is what companies like Google love, but if it was a lot friendlier it would probably be less safe.
I tried LibreWolf for a little while, but too many sites just wouldn’t load at all with it, so I went back to Firefox.
Brave is kinda shady with their whole cryptocurrency thing, Helium seems fine but it’s still based on Chromium. I’ve been recommending people check out Librewolf
Simple Firefox is perfectly fine.
Ungoogled Chromium is my standby for the instances when a Blink browser is needed, though it’s not entirely simple to set up.
Librewolf doesn’t do anything that Firefox can’t do with extensions + tweaking settings, but it’s nice to not have to install all the extensions
Yeah that’s why I’m debating brave. Firefox is good to especially after the huge engine overhaul a few years ago.
Yeah, I’ve been on brave for a few years but switched to Firefox because it’s a different base. I don’t think it’s necessary better, but if that’s the way the wind is blowing on chromium browsers the it’s the best option.
Zen-Browser
And i removed Chrome from my devices
I think I’ll be switching to librewolf at home. It can install mozilla extensions and comes with ublock origin baked in. Pulling a stunt like this is just going to drive people away from the Chrome environment. Corpos can’t help but shoot themselves in the foot.
Most people I know simply don’t care. They will use it because it’s convenient and they don’t care about the privacy dangers. I can’t comprehend it myself though. Drives me up the wall.
They will use it because it’s convenient
Using web without ublock is amongst the most inconvenient things I’ve experienced
I think most people who don’t know better just think that’s “the internet” and that it’s the same no matter how you access it. The whole concept of browsers and extensions is just not in the realm of concern.
I’ve seen some shift among the tech illiterate in my immediate vicinity, but most are still in the “I got nothing to hide” category of clueless twits.
Funnily enough my two kids have expressed hatred of AI. It’s mainly people around my age or higher that can’t let any sort of convenience go even if shown the dangers.
Otherwise I’m just “scaremongering”.
The kids are alright, then.
My 14yo hates the current AI but says most peers are using it and can’t understand how to write an essay or such without it.
I think only some of the kids are alright. Many, if not most, are in trouble.
The problem is that everyone’s internet experience is very different these days. Your friends might be boring and actually have nothing in their lives that need compartmentalized/obfuscated. It’s unlikely but not impossible.
The easiest way to demonstrate the problem would be when they show you something on an unprotected device you note the ads and give them shit for it. Those ads are likely targeted, and so your jabs would be targeted and personal too. Then point out that those ads are tied to THEM. Just ask every time, “have you been looking at X? Gross dude.” It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s the point that they are uncomfortable with your guess and it’s an opening to explain that, yeah it’s not just those ads buddy.
People who share every intimate detail of their life online don’t care about privacy.
company which makes most of it’s revenue from advertising fucks with their browser’s ability to remove ads. Go figure!
i am surprised it took this long, but i know that getting everybody using chromium, or at least webextensions, was part of the plan that had to exist first. and the path down mv3 started not long after both mozilla and microsoft were both roped-in.
I have to say I’m not surprised. No one wants to pay for a browser.
If you pay, do you get a say or is it the same play but you paid?
Bye Chrome, I hardly knew ya.
This is gonna be so bad because now there is only uBlock origin lite and “uBlock”, if you couln’t guess: the 2nd one is a scam that google never tried to remove(it’s been up for some years IIRC) and i am sure that everyone will try to install this scam because they can’t find the original uBlock origin (and everyone just refers to uBlock origin as uBlock which makes it worse)
the 2nd one is a scam that google never tried to remove
It’s a little more complicated. uBlock was the original name, gorhil handed it off when he felt the maintenance burden became too high. Then he forked it to make his own uBlock Origin version.
At some point later uBlock was bought up by the AdBlock people, who in turn were later bought by the AdBlock Plus people.
So it’s not a scam exactly, more like an inbred sideline of the royal family.
It’s a scam because it specifically goes out of its way to not block an ad, as long as that ad pays a bribe to them. It should be called uAd.
Holy shit, seems to be watching a soap opera tf
1 million users…
“1 million deceived users”.
There, I fixed it for you. You’re welcome.
so it
beginscontinues…
Just a crying shame Mozilla has turned into a commercial nightmare making them relatively poor custodians of the only free choice we have left.
Mozilla needs to die so Firefox can live.
The income stream from Firefox is plenty for a highly technical, deeply competent, widely dispersed team could work full time on the product using something like OpenCollective.
Instead what we get is prime SF real estate offices, “competitive” SF salaries and a commercial organisation that seeks weird and increasingly desperate income streams to justify looking like “real company”.
I want an actual non-profit governing Firefox.
It’s called the forks, dude.
Also, hopefully the
ladybugthing or whatever gets off the ground someday.Edit: Servo is the better project to follow.
I think you mean ladybird, right?
Just FYI The core maintainer is very close to the alt right open source sphere.
Rejecting inclusivity as he deems it as too political and just rubbing shoulders with really weird guys.https://drewdevault.com/blog/Cloudflare-and-fascists/
https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/There is servo though which is picking up speed lately, im following their rss for a while now.
https://servo.org/
The money behind is also a lot more public and the project is more open to people. originally developed internally at mozilla it is now in the hands of the linux foundation europe.Ah ty. I wasn’t keeping track of either project, but good to know servo’s the one to look out for instead.
Netsurf hasn’t seen any love lately. It’s still being developed on git but no releases. Same with Dillo.
Dillo rejects scripting. Makes perfect sense to me. It also rejects automatic redirects, which also makes sense but the web has already been established around that as given so it can’t pass the most passive anti-bot.
The state of scripting support on Netsurf is uhm, quite interesting. Scripts can write to the page parse time (like a snowflake generator) but can’t do ANYTHING after the page loaded, EXCEPT text fields and text areas. And scripts can always read but not write checkbox state. There aren’t any button events, either, but if you check the state of a text field repeatedly you can do interactivity. What is also interesting is that the new way of finding elements (getElementById) is functional, but the old way (document.formName.elementName) ISN’T. So that means that basically nothing existing functions (apart from again, the snowflake generators from geocities). But you can do the old style text animations if you specifically program it to use the new method despite being old style shit. Netsurf also passes “GoAway” and the most basic setting of Anubis (the passive redirects).
Both are good enough to browse “old Lemmy”, although I haven’t tried to login since my instance doesn’t have it and the owner ghosted me (hi @milan@discuss.tchncs.de).
There’s also a half public domain half permissive (BSD) text mode browser, https://chawan.net/ . Extraordinarily good concept! However, it avoids some of the bloat by forcing bloat onto your terminal emulator and having it render images, and my terminal emulator does not bother itself with such tasks and emulates a terminal, so image heavy sites like Lemmy fucking suck on it. No, it cannot just weight different characters from some public domain font (spoiler: if converted, all of them by international conventions are public domain) by brightness and by individual pixel similarity to an actual image and then just display those. That would make too much sense. I have high hopes for it, though. Also, I find the keybinds really weird.
I have not tested Chawan’s scripting support much at all, all I can say is that it’s certainly better than Netsurf. And that everything I’ve written in the worst fucking programming language ever for Netsurf (not released yet, very soon I hope) runs on Chawan. However, they are unusable since textboxes open your preferred editor. Makes perfect sense, a browser shouldn’t be a text editor. But like, that breaks my gimmick that makes it work with Netsurf, damn. Checkboxes can be written to, for once, tho no access key support. The JS is still not enough to login to Lemmy (the default bloated frontend).
Let’s use Gemini.
But it isn’t really. The forks rely on the majority effort of Mozilla and they would never be able to maintain Firefox on their own.
This this true but if Mozilla closed it doors tomorrow there would be enough support for a team to be built to maintain it. The market share is small compared to chrome but it’s still an enormous user base.
Ah, the Sam Reich of browsers
Pichai you fucking banchode.
Bloody fuck you bloody!
Big win for Firefox.
Firefox is Chrome with extra steps
I’ve never seen a more downvoted comment. This is true for every single other mainstream browser except Firefox.
Some forks of Firefox are ok, but if you actually dig and look inside about:config you’ll see with who it communicates, what telemetry it collects. What organisations fund it.
Thanks for the laugh!
Care to elaborate? It’s actually not like chrome at all. The engine is different, it’s not Google, they haven’t blocked manifest v2 plugins… Other than being a web browser, how would you classify it as Chrome?
In about:config check with what google services, urls, relays, vpns browser communicates. What organizations donate most money.
Hardly makes it “Chrome with extra steps”.
Did you actually look inside?
I don’t have to. Yea, it shares some backend Google services, but the rest of the browser, like the other 90% isn’t Chrome. It’s like comparing Windows and Mac OS and saying that they’re the same because they both connect to the same Internet and that their operating systems. Just like Chrome v Firefox, they are two distinctly different products.
Not only are they different, Gecko is like 12 years older than Chromium.
I guess they could be referring to how much money Google throws at Mozilla to keep Google Search as standard in Firefox? Still, it’s a tenuous link at best
You can say that about almost every browser, but not Firefox.
That doesn’t even make sense. You bots need better prompts
Probably just young
Maybe used Chrome for years before ever hearing about Firefox
Huh, do we have engagement bots in Lemmy already?
We’re thriving guys!
Lol no
Still time to delete this
Not really. UBlock Origin Lite works really well. They even added content scripts recently. From a technical perspective MV3 offers more security by default.
No, they’re intrinsically less secure.
They generate memory issues (
use-after-free, dangling pointers,double free(), zombie processes, uncomplete teardown, GC failures or abrupt stops, race conditions, etc.) because of their shitty isolation, and their poor service-workers and IPC architecture.What’s worse, they greatly limit the network APIs needed to active defense (DNR instead of
webRequest).No, they’re intrinsically less secure.
GrapheneOS disagrees with you:
https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
I agree however that Chromium has some issues still. I have personally managed to crash my browser when calling the Mojo APIs via JavaScript. However, it wasn’t related to security. As GrapheneOS notes, no other browser engine provides the same levels of sandboxing. Recognizing the effectiveness of Chrome’s sandbox, Microsoft began evolving Windows kernel access control to formalize and harden these techniques at the OS level. The upcoming Windows Updates implements this in its new ProcessContainer support.
Blaming process isolation and IPC for memory bugs like Use-After-Free and dangling pointers fundamentally confuses language-level C++ problems with OS containment architecture. Memory corruption exists across all C++ engines (Gecko, WebKit, Blink); isolation is what prevents those bugs from compromising the host OS.
Handing third-party extensions blanket permissions to inspect and modify live plaintext traffic across all tabs creates a massive MITM exfiltration surface. Moving rule matching to declarativeNetRequest enforces least privilege by executing filters in the native engine without exposing sensitive network payloads to extension code.
webRequestBlocking is not deleted in MV3. The synchronous blocking engine still exists in Chromium. If an extension is installed via local policy or the Windows Registry (ExtensionInstallForcelist), full programmatic webRequestBlocking executes in Manifest V3 just as it did in MV2.
Blaming process isolation and IPC for memory bugs like Use-After-Free and dangling pointers fundamentally confuses language-level C++ problems with OS containment architecture. Memory corruption exists across all C++ engines (Gecko, WebKit, Blink); isolation is what prevents those bugs from compromising the host OS. Yeah, but they instead greatly compromise the browser, and the problem is that these are not as likely to happen in MV2 (i.e., Firefox). Why? Simple:
- You have a long operation running inside an extension.
- Your system (or the browser itselfs) suspends or even kills the associated Service Worker.
- A new one has to be created.
- If the previous memory chunk goes unreferenced, then you have a double free and/or an UAF.
- If the previous memory chunk doesn’t get unreferenced, then you get a dangling pointer.
- Either way you get a race condition if it’s something concurrent.
The problem is, if an attacker and/or a malicious process do compromise that unreferenced or unallocated memory, then any and all sandboxing will be esentially irrelevant and thus vulnerated, vulnerating not only the browser (something that itself can compromise sensible information), but even the OS.
Then you have the zombie processes because the current memory model in V8 causes SWs to forcedly stop before they can do any cleanup.
MV3 is not about security at all, is about more control over your own computer and about more control over the network (that way they can let more trackers, zero-days, ads, malvertisers and even malware to pass because browser-level blockers and firewalls won’t be able to block them).
Handing third-party extensions blanket permissions to inspect and modify live plaintext traffic across all tabs creates a massive MITM exfiltration surface. Moving rule matching to declarativeNetRequest enforces least privilege by executing filters in the native engine without exposing sensitive network payloads to extension code.
You’re doing a false equivalence here.
It’s not about blanket permission vs. almost no permissions.
You can have granular ACLs (which are being hindered by MV3), or OCap/CapSec, or even other security and permissions approaches.
They’re or incompetent or malevolous, these are the only two options left when you think a bit about it.
webRequestBlocking is not deleted in MV3. The synchronous blocking engine still exists in Chromium. If an extension is installed via local policy or the Windows Registry (ExtensionInstallForcelist), full programmatic webRequestBlocking executes in Manifest V3 just as it did in MV2.
It is in practice. Not all users are able to do that (local policy install), as not all users are (or have to be) that tech savvy. That’s an exclusionary barrier towards inclusion and accesibility of security and sovereignity features.
The following filter options can’t be translated into DNR rules:
strict1p, strict3p: whether a network request is same-origin as its initiator Entity-based values for domain= filter option (webextensions #394) redirect-rule=: the DNR API does not support redirect-if-blocked concept (webextensions #493) Click-to-load embedded contexts through redirect=click2load.html filter option Regex-based removeparam= modifier filter options Exceptions for all modifier filter options are not possible Workarounds exist for removeparam= and csp= by carefully tuning the priority property. Many very useful regex-based filters used in uBO are not allowed, or are rejected by the DNR API (webextensions #344) replace=, can't modify the response body (full support is only possible with Firefox MV2) ipaddress=, can't use IP address as a condition to block/unblock (full support is only possible with Firefox MV2) urlskip=, this requires programmatic steps to extract a URL from another URL (partial support, for strict-blocked pages only)aside from that it is somewhat better than default ublock but that’s a pretty big list of issues.
There’s also pretty restrictive length limits on filter lists iirc, so ubo lite would have to select top filters at some point. This getting worse as websites add more ads or obfuscate more requiring more rules.
Like FB putting every character in every [w][o][r][d] on the site into a unique code block
Some of those limitations were never supported in Chrome to begin with. MV3 still supports webRequestBlocking at the engine level but it is gated behind enterprise policy (ExtensionInstallForcelist in the Windows Registry, macOS MDM, or Linux managed policy JSON). If an extension with webRequestBlocking is installed via policy, it restores programmatic interception.
Not all users are able to do that, as not all users are (or have to be) that tech savvy. That’s an exclusionary barrier towards inclusion and accesibility of security and sovereignity features.
In practice, I found it breaks sites more, lets some things through, triggers more adblock detectors, and doesn’t work as well with the annoyance list.
It doesn’t work on YouTube. And the maximum number of entries to block is limited.
Its not catastrophic though.
So UBO Lite is not wholly ineffective, no. It works great, mostly. Buts its definitely more of a nuisance to use, which is exactly what Google wants.
Thanks for the laugh! Keep telling yourself that.
