- Search results are not highlighted on the scroll bar, which means no information on grouping at a glance, and can't just scroll to the relevant part. I have to go through matches one by one.
- Font rendering is subtly broken as always. A specific example is font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums, which seems completely broken at least for -apple-system (.SF NS Text); as a result a data aggregation site of mine which I read all the time looks awful, larger numbers may be narrower and vice versa. (Oddly, font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums seems to work for "Fira Sans" on MDN; I haven't found another font it works on.)
- With developer tools open, pages are really slow.
I'm probably forgetting something else.
(I should add that I also forced Safari upon myself, which is a shitshow, problems too numerous to list. Until Google completely removes ad-blocking capabilities I need, Chrome is simply the best there is.)
How about a sane Profile manager? This is something I use heavily on Chrome. The "about:profiles" UI doesn't cut it.
Also when I use Firefox on my non-work Fedora machines (and this is going from Fedora 21 to 29) it seriously chews up memory and CPU. Facebook (yeah, I know) is rendered unusable after about 30 mins. And as other post(s) have pointed out, video playback can be a bit janky. These machines aren't slouches either, i5 ~2.5Ghz 4th or 5th gen, 8GB RAM, SSD, and dedicated graphics cards.
I'd love to switch, but these are things that are deal breakers.
I don’t want to use Chrome, but I still wouldn’t call that very great.
Yep, to be honest this is probably me. I use UBo, but I'm willing to make do with less effective rule-based blockers as long as the most obnoxious and intrusive ads are blocked.
Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the
capability to block unwanted content, but this will be
restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome.
I gotta say I'm kind of glad Google is doing this. It will force me to finally abandon Chrome, something I should have done awhile ago.
I believe this is a misnomer. The enterprise deployment stuff I’m aware of in Chrome/Chromium is accessible by any user, as far as I know, and in the past I’ve used it to force private browsing on always for my own personal usage.
That said, I switched to Firefox when Quantum came out and haven’t looked back. Mozilla has done some annoying stuff over time, but imo the browser itself is really solid, and with some tweaks is very good.
It's time to eliminate Google from your life as much as possible if you haven't already. Too many wake up calls. They are not a tech company, they are data monopolists. Stop giving them your data.
Is there such a thing? The "paid" part comes from the article's gloss, not from Google. I could see it instead being "this is a switch you can turn on in Group Policy."
Content can still be blocked with extensions, but it will be more difficult to handle large block lists.
See this comment from the author of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
The only thing I miss is a Session Buddy equivalent. When my computer crashes, it's nice to be able to restore all my tabs and windows, and also it's nice to be able to close a bunch of windows when I travel and then go back to my tab state from three weeks ago.
In addition, I like the integration with Firefox Bookmarks. It creates a folder "Session Sync" and stores sessions as sub-folders. So, if anything happens, I still have them as simple, curated bookmarks.
DOS 2.1 ain't done until Lotus won't run
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
I find this useful when researching a particular thing, and wanting to save the resources for later. Sorry I can't remember the exact menu items, as I'm on Firefox mobile and it doesn't do it.
Brave: https://brave.com/
I use Brave as my daily driver (with Shields Up and uBlock Origin), but I'm not sure what the actual impact will be when it comes.
What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.
This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:
In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.
The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business.
The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model.
Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.
Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.
Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.
In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.
ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.
Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you.
The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.
ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.
The number of egregious examples of their centralization backfiring against the freedoms within the day-to-day life of internet users keeps growing bigger at a seemingly exponential rate.
The barrier for competition may be high but history is littered with examples of giants withering under their own decision making. Nor will they forever be immune from antitrust laws.
Switch to Firefox people, it's not perfect but at least it's not Chrome.
In the same way a company trying to determine what a user looks at on their computer screen is a privacy issue, this is too. Those filters should be private.
Please use Firefox!
Even if it's worse. Even if its slower[1]. Even if it doesn't have that one feature or bug fix that you personally consider really important. Just use Firefox anyway. Find a workaround. Suffer whatever it is you dislike about Firefox because in the end if we don't act as individuals against the chrome monopoly then google are going to own the web and we'll suffer a far worse period of monoculture than the IE6 ever was.
If you can't go all the way, going part of the way is still valuable. I personally have chrome installed still because there are a couple if internal sites at my work that have problems on Firefox, so I use Chrome for those but Firefox for everything else.
Firefox for Android is also solid browser, and as a bonus you don't see any AMP stuff.
If you're a website/app maintainer, check for compatibility in Firefox.
It's worth supporting Firefox to keep the web the way it should be. I know they make mistakes sometimes, but we need a viable alternative or it will be too late.
([1] I don't think it is, it's made soild improvements in recent years, but lots of people seem to have their own specific issue they hold dear against it)
I prefer Chrome for sure. It full screens video properly (which I need to automatically trigger turning off f.lux), it seemed faster, it does spell checking of form fields.
I'm sticking with Firefox though as these features aren't much of a hindrance compared to the increasingly shitty behaviour of Google, and one benefit is that my Macbook Pro (2014, max spec), doesn't run out of resources and stop responding anywhere near as often as it used to do.
I prefer the customizability of Vivaldi but Firefox has been fine. I can't think of anything that is a thorn in my side at all. In fact, 99% of the time I can't tell a difference functionally, but I'm not a typical web browser (I disable JS except on trusted sites).
I think for the general population they wouldn't notice much difference between chrome and firefox.
Edit to add: Not defending Chrome. I've used IE and Edge since IE9 came out because I saw this thing coming. And I promoted other browsers all the way. Didn't help. I am not moving to Chrome ever and will try and avoid the Chromium Edge as long as I can as I'm not a stranger to sticking with a strange browser choice :)
I'm just saying that maybe something else should be done about Google's browser market share.
It's also got a weird memory leak, which I think is related to the pdf viewer. Never really checked in detail or tried to measure.
It seems like my entire profile (about:profiles) got switched out several times with a brand new one. Exact same symptoms as you - bookmarks, custom UI tweaks, extensions, etc. all gone (basically consistent with creating a new profile yourself). For a regular user, I think that only needs to happen once for them to uninstall and never come back.
Most of the time I've been able to restore it to my old profile, but one time a file was corrupted and I had to start from scratch again. It happened before the extension signing fiasco, and those two things combined led me to explore new options (Vivaldi, Chromium, etc.) although those didn't pan out for me so here I am, still on Firefox and crossing my fingers hoping it won't happen again.
Perhaps relevant: I do have Nightly and Developer Edition installed alongside the regular version. I used to use Nightly as my daily driver, but switched to the regular version after the first time my profile got messed up.
All my other settings seem fine, however.
I basically can't trust them anymore.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/7/17326184/firefox-ads-spons...
the internet without an adblocker is simply not usable for me.
Checkout surf (webkit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023287
Another is UnGoogled-Chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Would love to see this latter option becoming something that appeals to a very large, mainstream market rather than just a few techies.
If Google's behaviour concerns you, you need to use Firefox or Safari.
It would be especially nice if we can get the Vivaldi developers to fork Blink to keep the old API around.
There must be just way too much friction for a user to say, yeah, charge me $1/mo please.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefo...
As far as I can tell, it's the same browser...
https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download/
[1] https://robinwils.gitlab.io/articles/sbcl-browser-engine.htm...
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles Content Blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, Content Blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the websites they visit.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
I do remember back when I used chrome there would be new `console.x` features that were chrome only from time to time, but after I switched to FF I never really looked back
Nope, they're perfectly functional systems. Just browse and search.
Netscape -> Opera -> Firefox (in beta) -> Chrome (early beta) -> Firefox
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...
Also, the headline seems mostly incorrect. The gist of it, as I understand, is that Chrome is enforcing a migration from the webRequest API to a new declarativeNetRequest API. The latter API doesn't currently have all the capabilities of the former, which is important for context blocking extensions. However, features are still being added and the team states that they are interested in more feedback from extension developers.
I really think it is a bad practice to force adoption of a new API that can't fulfill the same functions as the previous one.
Nobody would be here talking about this if they just made the new API without breaking add blocking (useful add blocking), and then forced people to move.
Even more so given that it looks really bad when your main goal is to serve people ads.
It's still good that I can run Firefox on Android but we have to make Chrome the new IE fast.
Microsoft has literally done that already: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/
Chrome isn't the only guilty one here; it just happens to be the most user-hostile, maybe because it started the trend (good example being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7329855), but all the other ones have made similar decisions. Firefox made extension signing mandatory (many people think Mozilla is benevolent, but that doesn't mean their views will continue to align with yours), and more recently IE, which could be said to have been the last reasonably popular browser with a per-zone configuration and site whitelisting/blacklisting feature by default, was deprecated for the far more dumbed-down (and now becoming even more Chrome-like) Edge.
But as long as you can still install a custom CA and set a proxy server, you're still in complete control over the content your machine receives; there have been many changes to frustrate that (first HTTPS, now DoH --- to protect, not just from attackers, but you), but it is still possible to MITM and control your experience. There's been a strong opposition to them ostensibly for "security" reasons, however, the way things are going, you will give up your freedom and security.
(I'm a long-time Proxomitron user. It's far more fine-grained than DNS-level blocking, although I also use a HOSTS file, and I can do more than just block. The best part is, it works for all browsers, even the ones embedded in other apps.)
They've also added features like built-in TOR support. Right click a link and one of the context options is 'Open link in private window with Tor'. You can then change 'identities' (Tor exit node -> IP/country) with a single click as well. Absolutely awesome for geoblocked content or even just seeing what users from other countries would see. Kind of fun to play 'Google Roulette' and perform the same search from various places around the world.
And obviously there's built in ad blocking and all that good stuff. It's like a Chrome that runs absurdly fast (in part because all the rubbish is removed) and has put privacy as a #1 consideration. Of course the downside is that, as mentioned, it uses Chromium as the renderer. If Google starts bringing this stuff over to Chromium, which is probably a non-zero possibility, that's going to pose major issues to browsers like Brave.
Incidentally I was also a long time Proxomitron user!
> Apps tell Safari in advance what kinds of content to block. Because Safari doesn't have to consult with the app during loading, and because Xcode compiles Content Blockers into bytecode, this model runs efficiently. Additionally, Content Blockers have no knowledge of users' history or the websites they visit.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
The only particular thing I can find is that hyperlink auditing can no longer be disabled. I doubt this is what you meant when you said features you "depend on".
But here's what worries me, what I'm wondering now: As far as I'm aware, Mozilla/Firefox tried to follow Google for extensions, deprecated their own API for Google's/Chrome's instead.
How likely is it that Mozilla will further "follow the spec" so to speak, doing a change like this for compatibility or whatever?
In addition, their reasons for deprecating their old extension API was purely technical. Even then, they were extremely conservative in their deprecation timetable, waiting long past when the old API was massively harming performance. But once they made the decision to replace it, it made sense that they would choose an existing API as a base, not make a separate incompatible API.
But do note that, while Firefox and Chrome share the same base extension API, Firefox has APIs Chrome doesn't. It's reasonable to believe that this new deprecation will just become another thing that Firefox has and Chrome doesn't.
Maybe this is a viable solution on brand new chromebooks, but on my Acer R11 both Android apps and Linux containers run pretty poorly. I use an Android app as my password tool just fine, but trying Firefox was a rather poor experience. And the linux container just dogs trying to do anything.
I have Ubuntu loaded on via crouton (to use tools like GIMP or actual VLC), but if chrome gets rid of ad blocking that removes much of the point of ChromeOS for me entirely.
It's a painful decision, to be sure, but the Microsoft team has to make a decision here: fork or adhere. The immediate benefit of forking and not following Chromium on this change is obvious. However, the cost of the fork will grow over time and it will be in Google's interest to deprecate and replace all of the infrastructure that supports the webRequest API to make it maximally painful to maintain the functionality in a fork.
On the other hand, had Microsoft decided to base Edge on Gecko, they wouldn't be working off a forked codebase whose owner has a perverse incentive to make the fork as painful and expensive as possible.
How many engineer hours, months, years are going to be wasted just shoring up features like this?
I'll install Firefox, they will see things are better and the switch is done. No need to talk about Quantum, freedom, etc.
Mozilla should be sending one of those cakes to the Chrome team.
We need a chrome install blocker...
Chrome engineers want to replace the ability to block any request with a standardized ad-block functionality based on a list of provided rules and inspired by Safari. In other words the ad-blocking functionality becomes built-in.
However this facility excludes dynamic capabilities that plugins like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger need.
Also I’m speaking with first hand experience in this field: the ad-blocking functionality provided but Safari sucks and can be easily fooled. That there are publishers that don’t implement anti-ad-blocking measures, that’s only because they either don’t have the resources or because they don’t want to piss off users.
And at this point uBlock Origin is by far the most aggressive extension out of the popular ones and the nightmare of advertisers, not only because of its capabilities, but also because it doesn’t have a commercial entity behind it.
It is no accident that Google is hitting these extensions.
Switch to Firefox folks. The grass over here really is greener ;-)
If Mozilla didn't have such a demented mechanism to operate with multiple profiles then I'd happily switch from Chrome. This is a feature that should be upfront in the UI, not hidden behind about:profiles and it's generally janky UI and behaviour. This needs to be a first class citizen, not what feels like some half baked afterthought.
The other issue is that Chrome on mobile doesn't support extensions.
They tried to away with not having ad-block on mobile this way. No extensions means no ad-block.
Let's just have a new browser based on Chrome that supports mobile + extensions and ad block and tell Google they can go pound sand.
Edit: I've just been informed this will effect all Chromium browsers. My goodness.
The way ad networks function, is unblocking a site you want to support any different at all from unblocking everything?
I've been using it for couple of weeks now as a secondary browser to Brave (separate sessions etc) and it is looks and behave like a normal Chrome.
Hope MS fight this.
This makes both mBlock Origin and PieHole obsolete. Where do we go from here?
Step 1: Enable "Built-In Ad-Blocker"
Step 2: Disable all other ad-blocks from store for some reason
Step 3: Allow only ads from Google ad-network
They can't do that, this is an anti-trust lost case for them.
At the moment you have awesome projects like Project Zero [2], but how long till they start strategically handling exploits for monetary gain? Contrast Project Zero to Project Dragonfly [3]. Nobody should be relying on them being good actors.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-launches-portals-a-new-...
[2] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/
[3] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/26/technology/google-dragonfly...
It makes web browsers big and complex. I know both Chrome and Firefox are open source, but does that really matter so much when the codebase is so big and complex that only large and well-funded organizations are able to develop it? I'm not sure if it's realistic anymore for a few guys to get together and create a web browser (including rendering engine) in their spare time.
This centralization can lead to censorship, as we're starting to see here.
We also end up with a mono-culture (well, not quite there yet, since there are still at least 2 web rendering engines), which is horrible for security. The Irish potato famine is good example of what can happen when you have a mono culture. These days, you often have to let strangers execute code on your computer, if you just want to read an article or look at some pictures.
Way to work that Lily Tomlin "Ernestine" vibe Google.
Edit: also, "Oh, we're so sorry that our 'security' update is going to gut something that users love but our accountants hate (for anyone else). This is completely an unintended consequence."
And after a couple hours....
....Firefox is pretty impressive! I'm actually going to switch to using it as my "daily driver".
In this case, Firefox again.
I've been going back to Firefox for 6 month now, both on desktop and mobile. I'm a developer so I still need to use Chrome for testing, but I'm never going back to it as my main browser, for obvious reasons. There is an obvious conflict of interest going on here, and I'm not going to give Google any more money.
Firefox works fine now, didn't get any issue whatsoever. It used to be slower than Chrome, yes, but it's not true anymore and it uses way less memory than Google's browser.
That's why I don't trust Google with anything, Golang, Goggle PAAS, whatever, they'll go full Oracle in a few years, mark my words.
It's a shame all these companies follow such a predictable pattern. Any resources to help actively ungoogle? I've switched search, email, and browser so far, and will be pushing everyone I know to avoid. Long time coming.
As you're deciding what browser to move to, consider using two browsers: Firefox for any sites you need to log into or otherwise identify yourself, and Tor Browser for everything else. I've been trying this a while, and it works pretty well.
Would be a good point of difference for them.
This is the reason I quit using DigitalOcean: every page on their web site required me to enable 5 new domains in NoScript. Other VPS providers just required 1 or 2 enabled.
Or, if the site is coded so that it only works after enabling ad-looking domains, I leave. Vote with your feet folks.
It's maybe not gonna fly in the US but definitely workable in Europe.
A big thank you to the developers at pihole, mozilla and the plugin devs.
Mozilla should use this for a PR move (even though the bulk of its revenues come from having Google as the default search engine in many geographies).
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...
Opera has it built-in to the browser so I think they'll be safe too.
Wonder if this will apply to Chromium or just Google Chrome?
Remember, with https you can install a certificate and man-in-the-middle yourself. This is how tools like Fiddler and Charles allow inspecting and debugging HTTPS.
In this case, a natively-installed proxy can deny requests to blacklisted domains.
The only way this could be changed is through (EU?) law, but i'm not sure what would be the basis of such law. It would be like forcing every car manufacturers to implement free HEPA air filters in their cars.
So, hey, thanks google :)
I've been using Firefox since "quantum" on both my MacBooks(one of which is old AF) and on Linux. I've yet to have problems playing video, streaming, or anything of the sort. I keep tons of tabs open. I just can't really say anything wrong about Firefox at this point.
It was once the case that Firefox had significant disadvantages in contrast to Chrome, but now the only reason I have to still keep Chrome installed is when work forces me to use some Google-proprietary page that doesn't work in other browsers.
If you had problems with Firefox 2 years ago, try it again before bringing up performance when people are considering it as an alternative to deleting Chrome. The more people who uninstall Chrome, the better.
Bonus irony for realizing that a properly configured blocker as they’re favoring with this title would reduce their site’s revenue, being both JavaScript and ad-heavy.
Essentially building a paywall around their services, where receiving their ads is the subscription cost.
Is this a realistic extrapolation of the direction they're moving?
If you are not using/contributing to firefox, you sold yourself short.
If Microsoft would have donated only 50% of the Edge browser development budget to Firefox, Firefox would be in a much better position in the future to compete against Chrome.
Now, I fully expect Google to end its search contract with Firefox, or pay them much less, too, since it won't feel like it needs to fund its competitor anymore.
Wait, will Chromium have the same problem?
Not that Firefox isn't going the same way eventually. Firefox crippled the ability for real customization with Firefox 57 and it's only gotten worse since then.
" It's really unfortunate how many people seem to be commenting here without understanding what the proposed changes even are. To be clear:
1. This change _IS NOT INTENDED TO GIMP AD BLOCKERS_. Rather, it is designed to make them faster and more secure. (Yes, even despite the limitations that might impact uBlock.)
2. The new proposed content blocking API _is not final_ and can/will be changed.
3. Threatening to switching to Firefox is not helpful and _WILL NOT CHANGE GOOLE'S MIND ABOUT THIS_.
If you don't understand this, please refrain from commenting as you'll only be decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio in this thread and thus making it more likely that the entire thread (including those who are expressing actual legitimate concerns about the limitations of the new API) gets ignored.
If you want to help:
1. Explain a specific use case that the new API can't handle (including a technical explanation of _why_ it can't handle that use-case)
2. Suggest constructive changes to manifest V3's API that will improve its capabilities _while still adhering to the stated goals of manifest V3_
3. If you can't do any of the above, please refrain from commenting so you don't just make things worse
Sorry if I sound aggressive. It just really frustrates me when constructive technical discussions get hijacked by large volumes of unconstructive, uniformed comments. It makes it way harder to get real work done. "
I know the anti-google bandwagonning is strong, but seriously, I doubt most people actually tried to understand what is being changed here, and it's sad.