I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance.

If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-rank sites based on privacy and performance.

It was never about improving peoples web experience.

https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/browsing-withou...

I feel really bad for less tech-savvy users who'll be stuck with this nightmare version of the internet.

I have the same experience as you, every time I set up a new machine or watch friends/relatives browse the web, it just blows my mind how bad the unfiltered internet is.

Chrome still has many ad blockers. While I use chrome/chromium fairly little, ublock origin lite has worked well for me when I do. I'm aware older manifest V2 extensions are theoretically superior at blocking a wide variety of undesired content but if your main concern is not seeing ads, that is absolutely doable.

June 2025: Chrome MV2 deprecation enterprise rollout

Well the crappy copy does come with some extra text. (No judgement from me on whether the extra text improves the comic here; just that someone might think it does, and there's no arguing about taste.)

It's also interesting to see that XKCD itself explicitly supports eg hotlinking, and the license makes putting it into your own crappy creations rather easy. (Though I think the example linked to fails the 'attribution' requirement.)

Doesn't Safari have the same restriction, also ostensibly for "security/privacy" reasons? The only difference is that Apple doesn't have a web advertising presence, so you can't make the accusation that they're "abuse its market position to their own benefit".

Imagine what it would cost Google's bottom line if Apple was truly user-focused and enabled ad-blocking on desktop, mobile and embedded safari views by default. Someone do the napkin math please!

Defaults is exactly how Microsoft has been getting away with everything they did for forever. Anti-trust investigations? Irrelevant if you can just make it configurable but the default is Microsoft.

Most people don't change default settings unless prompted and guided. And adding a setting shuts up most of "us" coz we'll just change it.

The only reason they're remove the ability to configure something would've been if too many of us change the settings for too many of our friends and relatives for it to register negatively on their end and they'd try to get away with not allowing it to be configured / hiding it as much as possible until they actually get anti-trust investigated // convicted (Re: requiring Windows to ask if you want to install other browsers than Internet Explorer).

In other words, Google pays Apple ~$20B per year to be default search engine because they make ~$53B in revenue from those searches. This is profitable for both Apple and Google -- no "wildly illegal under-the-table measures" required.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/apple-gets-36percent-of-goog...

It's not that weird that people are a bit suspicious that it's really worth Google $20B/year.

The power of the default is just that, they it is the default.

Also Apple themself has only one incentive which is to get the best deal for themselves. Is Microsoft willing to offer more money than Google? The evidence points to no.

I don't know if or how much that's changed.

I just gave Bing a quick try, and it seems to be a bit more useful (for Singapore) now than it used to be. I haven't tried all the other alternatives.

even when an outsider tries to think of the nastiest scam, an insider shows up to explain the boring day to day is already worse.

If the page is too ad-ridden to tolerate, I may consider to just close that page, and go search for other options.

I use Firefox + uBlock Origin, because going to the wide commercial internet without some form of ad blocking is like going out without an umbrella when it's raining heavily.

Ad blockers usually block such stuff, for a good reason. But I don't mind it on a checkout page specifically though, because on a checkout page I wilfully disclose a ton of my private details, such as name, address, etc.

Good checkout pages work well with an ad blocker on.

Wasn’t Mozilla accused of selling data they collected from Firefox users?

Correct me if I’m wrong.

It's just the paradox of when you present yourself as "the good guys" - people will hold you extra accountable for things that others easily get away with as nobody expects them to do better.

Unfortunately, Mozilla tends to shoot themselves in their foot this way somewhat often.

You're telling me you block ads, but have to unblock ads to view your ad sales?

Is this in the DSM-V?

Apple and google did everything for you to not know about it. It’s not the first thread where people either don’t know about it or will read but won’t try.

Works fine on my machine. You might need to update your filter lists or try another content blocker app.

>Content blockers often block cookie banners too which can often result in broken functionality - a nightmare when you’re trying to buy tickets to something and have to “reload without blockers” for the website to work.

So don't enable the filter lists that try to block cookie banners?

There's also a new extension that was posted on hn a few weeks that's free and claims to have scriptlets to block youtube ads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43204406#43208085

You can perform video search through DuckDuckGo, Invidious, or Piped.

The latter two are often blocked themselves, copy the video URL and feed to mpv to play through your preferred video player on the command-line:

<https://mpv.io/>

Recent mpv / ytdl can almost always gain access. If you are blocked, check for updates to ytdl (which mpv typically uses for video/media downloading).

Ps changed the term to avoid confusion, thanks!

The webRequestBlocking api, which allows the extension to inspect all request/responses in real time and act on them. With manifest v3 the extension can only supply a list of expressions to block, and the expressions that can be used is very limited.

I understand that nerfing adblocking is definitely a big draw for Google, but Apple went the ManifestV3 route many years before, specifically to increase extension performance and privacy.

Back then there was a big uproar too, but mostly because Safari extension developers charged for a new version because they had to rewrite the entire thing.

But you're right. When I'm using Safari with 1Blocker, I don't even notice that I'm not using Chrome with uBlock Origin. And it accomplishes that with static rules instead of with an API that reads every request.

Very much a lesser of all evils situation.

Firefox is also the only open alternative to Chromium at the moment, so I prefer to endorse it instead.

There's no need to do it, their built-in adblocker supports the same rule lists.

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

There's also built in blocking under brave://settings/shields for Javascript and social features.

It doesn't have a specific feature to block fonts AFAIK but it does have fingerprint protection if that's your concern.

e.g. on DuckDuckGo.

(I work on Brave's adblocker, and FWIW the folks who work for Brave are very open about their affiliation when commenting about it online)

At least it certainly leaves me (personally) having second thoughts, even though I'm no purist and use proprietary software (but try prefer free software if I can).

In the last five years or so Firefox has increasingly introduced controversial changes that make it (IMHO) less good, primarily around interface design. And, from what I understand, Mozilla employs full-time UX designers who've been driving much of that. Of course, with Firefox it's still possible to modify, fix and restore all these recent interface "improvements" with user CSS but it's a constant annoyance to need to keep fixing it. Fortunately, there's an active community effort around restoring the Firefox interface and usability, exemplified by the brilliant Lepton project https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/releases.

My perception just watching the evolution of Firefox from the outside, is that it used to be a browser that celebrated the ethos of "Have it Your Way." However, Mozilla the company gets money to pay its executives and employees (millions in the case of more than one recent CEO) by actively driving users and eyeballs for Google, Pocket and other advertisers. So the company is highly incentivized to try myriad changes and redesigns to increase appeal to "the masses" of browser users. Thus, the UX keeps getting 'simplified' and 'de-cluttered' with advanced functionality 'de-prioritized' and add-on support demoted to second-class afterthought - instead of the shining key feature advanced users value most. Basically, in recent years the Firefox UX and end-user features have been pushed by the substantial payroll needs of the Mozilla company to become more like Chrome and Safari instead of embracing its unique position as a tool for power users who value advanced features, customization and extension. And it was all for naught because Firefox has continued to lose market share while ignoring (and even actively alienating) its niche community of fanatically devoted power users.

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/27415

I hate these arguments where people point to some other shitty thing a company is doing as some sort of gotcha.

Windows is split off from Lenovo/Dell. How's that working out for the Windows OS, or the Edge browser?

Edge is a perfectly good browser now? Probably should be its own company too if we are splitting Chrome off from Google.

I will tell you that we should split these companies into 100 parts if thats what you are asking.

Imagine if Apple licensed its chips out in competition with Qualcomm...

No, content blockers are specific to Safari. Third party apps can show ads just fine.

They've gone well beyond what Microsoft did in the 2000s.

Google owns so many panes of glass and funnels them all through its search and advertising funnel. They've distorted how the web (and mobile) work to accomplish this massive market distortion.

Search, Ads, and Android should be broken up into separate units. Chrome shouldn't be placed with any of those units.

While we're cutting, YouTube should be its own entity and stand on its own legs too.

Apple, Amazon, and Meta need the same scrutiny. Grocery stores and primary care doctors should not be movie studios and core internet infrastructure. Especially when those units are wholly subsidized by other unrelated business units, and their under pricing the market is used to strangle out the incumbents and buy them up on the cheap.

No? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299886

Startups would be able to grow larger. There would be less threat from big tech coming in to eat your market, and M&A wouldn't be the preferred exit strategy.

Tech talent would be able to get paid more without big tech setting wages and orchestrating coordinated layoffs. More successful startups = more money for venture and labor capital. Right now that money just goes to institutional shareholders which are not the innovation drivers of the economy.

Startups will actually get to compete for markets rather than having them won and subsidized by unrelated business units at the big tech titans. The solutions delivered will fit the market needs much better.

Even big tech itself might fetch a higher valuation and be greater than the sum of its parts. So much of big tech is inefficient, untethered from market realities (eg. Alexa), and a waste of talent and human capital on dead end projects. Having Jeff Bezos "pay whatever it takes" to acquire the rights to "007" is a sign of how bloated these market distorting companies have become.

This needs to happen and is long overdue.

Have you missed the part of my comment of my comment where I specifically mentioned "web advertising presence"? That's relevant, because ublock would only work on web ads. It can't block ads in the app store, or any other app (eg. spotify).

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AuBlockOrigin%2FuAssets+ap...

Thus they also clearly have an incentive to sabotage uBO. It may be a much smaller piece of their revenue than at Google, but it is a huge proportion of their revenue growth. Don't believe Apple's marketing about their caring for privacy, belied by their actions.

Can you link to a specific rule that shows Apple has web ads? The search results you linked either removeparam filters (which I guess is "tracking", but probably the most benign kind), malware sites that contain "apple.com", or analytics domains that seemingly belong to apple. Moreover there's no evidence that Safari's content blocker restrictions make a difference here. The domains are trivially blocked so it's unclear how apple is materially gaining from their nerfed adblock.

Google is an ad company restriction use of the primary ad-blocker on its browser, it's blatant.

Sure, it doesn't rule out google was secretly intending on doing it, only internal memos or whatever can prove that definitively. But at the same time, to immediately conclude that google was "abusing its market position", you would have to be maximally uncharitable to google. That's a sad way to see the world. Take for instance, the flak that google got for banning third party cookies. If this is done by anyone else (eg. Firefox), this would be seen as a good thing. However, cynics have opposed this on the basis that such change would disadvantage third party ad networks more than google, thus google was "abusing its market position to their own benefit" and therefore the change was bad.

The reasoning is obvious, and "plausible deniability" is not enough to give Google charity. The more difficult you make it to block ads, the more impressions, and the more money made. Yet you believe people should be "charitable" to the same company that can't hire the manpower to defend their own users against bad faith DCMA takedown notices. Because they ran the analysis, and it wasn't worth the cost.

Best case scenario, Chromium loses market share, implements the parts removed from V2, Google likely kicks the can down the road to Manifest V4.

There's no reason to believe companies deserve charitability. Companies are systems designed to extract maximum value, and when the world around that system changes, the system adjusts itself. It's not the systems fault for trying to get more value, it's our fault for letting them.

Eventually, there will be an overstep that make enough capable people mad, and those people will get together and make/mod something better.

The reason why Chrome waited for so long to add extensions was the danger they posed to users. I was at Google when Sergey often worried about what extensions would do to non technical and older users who get tricked into installing them, then I saw first hand that danger with my own grandparents. They had extensions intercepting every network request, redirecting certain sites to fake sites, and injecting code into pages. It was horrifying, and they were lucky that they didn't have significant money or identity theft.

Offering something then taking it away is materially different from never having offered it at all.

And it's not "altruistic" - it's because eval() and webRequestBlocking are bad for security and performance, so they're bad for a lot of users. Users who will switch to Safari or another browser without that extension API, because the browser is faster or didn't exfiltrate their banking credentials.

  | month   | Chrome | Firefox | Safari |
  | --      | --     | --      | --     |
  | Jan '25 | -1.29  | +0.07   | +0.84  |
  | Feb '25 | -0.75  | +0.08   | +0.03  |

I know these numbers seem tiny, but if these trends were to continue, Chrome could be under 50% marketshare by June 2026 and overtaken by the end of 2027

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...

Disco Stu has something to say about that

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...

Yes, Tik Tok still needs to divest ownership or be banned in the US

For one, they simply have had a better product, at least in the past. Part of their large monopoly is due to just being better outright for a large portion of users (presumably). Are we to punish making overly-good products?

For another, sell to whom? And why would they be a good steward?

And yet another, there's literally Chromium, which other browsers (built by other corps) use, e.g. Edge, Brave, etc.

Did Google have to open Chromium? No.

Disclaimer: I hold these opinions weakly and would love to learn more about why they might be ill-premised.

Google did not make Chromium from scratch, and so were obligated to use a license compatible with the previous source they used. That source can be traced back to KDE's Konqueror browser and its KHTML engine.

The modern web, as we all know, is all kinds of shit. Anybody here compile Firefox recently?

No point using 99% of the web due to the hostile, fraudolent, abusive approaches on top of the hollow (yeh, very very gentle world for the thing what it is) content. No point searching for advice, products, job, as crap is poured at you while your actions are registered, your profile is sold, just to pour dedicated crap on you by the highest bidder.

I have mail and 5 (7 with weather) pages I check regularly, and that's it. That's my online life. More like a hermit goes into town for tools and cans kind of digital solitary. Clicking on links only after reconsidering five times, if I am really interested in the possible content. Mostly here. So, so far away from the extremely curious me 20 or so years ago spending hours to the limit of my thirst and bladder, navigating all that is out there.

It is very sad what humanity made out of the Internet. It does not even hurt anymore. It is numb blob where the feeling about the rich common knowledge source this was and could have been should be.

Chrome is their project, they should be free to do whatever they want with it. People can use a different browser if they wish (I do).

This whole “better for users” bullshit is why I don’t respect Google as a company. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.

Google has a long history of "accidentally" breaking gmail on firefox and funneling users to Chrome back in the day. It's beyond stupid to argue they should be able to do whatever they want with their vertically integrated monopoly.

Like, if you want to dig holes in your own driveway sure whatever, but if you own all the roads in Detroit and you want to dig holes in them, then make a killing selling new tires and suspension repair a fair society wouldn't move out of Detroit, they'd fucking run you out of town.

Would Google be making the world shit if all its cloud services had only a few dozen thousand users?

What's forcing you to interact with Google isn't Google, but Google users.

It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.

If you're dealing with spam originating from Gmail, without any helpful action from Google, that's not really your choice.

If you're dealing with difficulties sending mail to Gmail users, without help from Google, that's also not really your choice.

If vast numbers of other people stopped using Gmail, those problems would mostly go away.

Just going to copy/paste this part of the comment you replied to, because it seems like you may have missed it?

>My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.

Not my wife - her school board mandates it.

True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.

Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.

Your post: > Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.

No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.

Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.

So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.

Organizations I don't like = Monopoly!

Organizations I like = ...

Gmail is not a government service. Google is free to make that work with only one browser, if they want.

You can't assert that Google must make Gmail work with any browser whatsoever, because that means supporting someone using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 5.5.

Of course lying about why makes it worse, but I don't think it would've been that much more okay if Google was honest and said "users' ability to install highly effective ad blockers hurts our bottom line so we're removing them".

I LOL every time I see it. Imagine the lengths they have to go to, to try to make people trust a product they have.

They shouldn't be free to use all the money in the world to corner a market, rope in the conpetition and then abuse that position.

It only works because nobody can touch them, it's otherwise straight illegal in most markets.

My mom, who has Ublock Origin installed on her Chrome by me, will never know these details.

I don't understand why they ads are not spliced into the stream. It would be undetectable by extensions at all.