PSA: How to keep using adblockers on Chrome and Chromium (opens in new tab)

I suspect it'll actually work much longer and just become more obnoxious to enable in a year. A complicated workaround that placates power users so they stay on Chrome but that most users won't bother with is perfect.

i would always tell them to install firefox. this is mostly for developers and tech oriented people who need to keep chrome around

If Google leaves a boolean switch in Chromium to keep V2 enabled then I assume most if not all of the third party Chromium-derived browsers will just flip it to true by default. That's easy for them to do, the hard part is if Google strips out V2 altogether and leaves the downstream browsers to patch it back in.

I consider my non-technical friends/family technically dead. They're lost souls you can't help, like Elizabeth Swan looking down at her father's ghost on the boat. We can't help.

Freedom and privacy are luxuries only available to those nerdy enough to use Linux. The rest are prey/prisoners/peasants to the technofeudal overlords.

After the XUL removal debacle a number of years ago, I can't trust Firefox to offer a suitably flexible and capable extension system over the long run.

While some people will claim that those changes were necessary, the impact was still very negative for the extension developers and users who were affected at the time.

The numerous other user-hostile decisions made by Firefox's developers certainly don't help repair the trust that was lost then.

> This seems like it's too hard to tell friends/family.

It's an opportunity for someone to write an "adblock fixer" app for the non-technical market.

You can't just send them a .reg file and tell them to double click on it and hit ok?

Just tell them to use Edge. It's the worse you can do to Google.

Same here, I’ll be switching to Firefox today after hearing this news.

Every app there are gets worse and worse -- aka Doctorow's enshittification

So people will just take the sudden deluge of ads in stride and move on. Chances of this moving people to Firefox is slim.

Isn't DNS-level blocking strictly less capable than even the nerfed Manifest V3 filtering API? V3 can still block at a more granular level than nuking entire hostnames AFAIK, even if it's not as granular as V2.

First recommendation would be Firefox.

There's a good chance that whoever is driving this change within Google gets promoted/retires in less than a year, and then it gets left in limbo forever like so many other TODO():'s in the code...

A common approach is to mess around with name resolution. Many operating systems have a hosts file that can be modified. You can do DNS on your own computer. Piholes are a variation on this where people usually use a separate machine to handle DNS requests for their entire network. If you cannot change the DNS for your computer/device, some people use a VPN. I believe this is how things are currently handled on Android.

This approach is less flexible than the filtering you can get from a web browser. On the other hand, it can be used to filter DNS requests from all software. With something like a Pihole, you can configure the Pihole and (maybe) your router, and it will work for all devices on your network.

On Android there is AdGuard which runs a VPN locally to block ads. It can also parse SSL traffic if one installs an SSL certificate but I don't like the idea very much. In the end I just use it as a light adblock for unencrypted traffic when I don't use Firefox.

You can use the hosts file to block ads.

https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Look up technitium dns

1) User agent switcher.

2) Report those sites to https://webcompat.com/, and/or to Mozilla (who have an evangelism team to reach out to those sites and get them to stop doing that).

I just keep a Chrome install around and when a website seems like it's misbehaving I just fire it up in Chrome.

It's a bunch of baggage to have around, but it's useful for other stuff. Like when you hit your monthly limit of free articles you can just fire it up in Chrome and now you've doubled your monthly free limit!

i do wish! firefox has web features missing that i need on a daily basis, and their developer team seems wholly uninterested on working on them at all

Pi-hole and other DNS-based ad blockers are a lot worse than even Manifest v3 ad blockers, so they aren't any alternative.

Imagine still using Brave in plain 2024.