uBlock Origin is no longer available on Chrome web store
old.reddit.comIt works better in Firefox anyway. Use Firefox and be happy:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
I absolutely agree with that from a technical perspective, but in typical usage, the users won't notice any difference.
To be honest, I think uBo almost become a cult (which is nothing wrong, to be clear). It has lots of very opinionated development progress happened/happening to it, and most of them are irrelevant for majority of users (even the "power" users). And if I dare to say, it's at the cost of its UX.
For example, a few years ago, uBo disabled the ability to "greenlight" a domain (i.e. adding a whitelist dynamic rule) by simply clicking in the (advanced) popup. The official reason is that it's the most misused features, which is true, but it makes legitimate use of it (to whitelist a 3rd-party domain for a specific site because otherwise the site is broken) very inconvenient.
And if you ask about it, they (people in related forums like reddit) tell you "well you should never use it. NOOP should be sufficient. If not, the rules are wrong and you should report to the rule author(s)." This is cool but it didn't solve my immediate problem that a site I want to visit is broken by uBo.
I learned later, again from uBo subreddit, that you can double press ctrl to temporarily enable this feature back -- which is more than enough for me -- but how the hell do you even discover this?
And I never remembered what the two columns for adding dynamic rules are supposed to be -- since there is no headers.
The problem is that as much as I want Firefox to be a better browser than chrome - Blink is still a far better rendering engine than anything else. Every other browser either has inferior performance (including Firefox) or is just a fork of chrome.
I spent a year trying to use Firefox after being a chrome user for well over a decade - I eventually switched back when Mozilla started adding the same tracking features that chrome started out with years ago. Mozilla seems to be going down the same path, albeit several years behind and slowly. After that I just didn’t see a reason to not just use chrome if I’m going to have to neuter tracking bullshit anyway since it’s still much more performant than Firefox.
V3 complaint UB exists (UBo Lite) and works plenty fine save for what even I (as a power user) would call power user features. It’s very annoying that Google is going down this route, and I really want Firefox to be the better browser, but I just don’t think it is yet. During my year of usage you definitely can notice the performance difference and the inconsistency in certain webpages.
Firefox has a vested interest (money) now for people to watch (their network) ads. Expect to move Firefox to drop uBlock too (written in Firefox with uBlock)
Is this supposed to be an argument for Chrome? They had their chance and blew it.
If Mozilla proves unviable we’ll move from Firefox to the next entity that isn’t hostile to their user base or make one that isn’t.
You say that like web rendering engines grow on trees...
At this point your (multi-platform) options are:
There is one/two new "third" browsers/engines in the works that will be ready "who knows when".- Chrome + its kin - Firefox + its kinThe shift you'd make is from Firefox to something based on Firefox / Chrome... then you wait and hope that Ladybird actually gets somewhere or that the Servo engine doesn't take another forever to mature... and someone builds a browser around it. I'd call that mighty slim pickings. Especially considering how beholden the downstream browsers are to the upstream ones, particularly for smaller projects.
No it's an argument against the comment "It works better in Firefox anyway"
If and when that happens, then I will move off Firefox
Where to? Sadly I'm on Windows and there are no more options that I can see. So it will be dual boot again in the future I guess + Ladybird.
I have ADHD and I cannot use a product if there is ads. In any form they exist in, they take up time, energy, and attention, all of which I have precious little of compared to the average person.
Ensuring I still have PiHole or NextDNS to block ads at a DNS level, I'd use Safari with any adblock extension.
Failing that, I'd browse the compatible web with a TUI browse in terminal.
Failing that I'm reading books and taking notes on paper or in Vim. No internet for me.
I'm a screen reader user. It's similar for me, accept if I really wanted to navigate around the ads I suppose i could. However i do have chronic migraines, so that reduces my ability to care about ads. Or X embeds, Or facebook sharing widgets. So no, it isn't just an ad thing, it's a let's not take a whole bunch of energy to navigate a page thing.
I sympathise. It annoys me to no end that accessibility seems to be an afterthought on the modern web.
Another thing for me is that popups annoy me. If I get too many modals pop up on a page, I get emotionally frustrated. This is quite common these days with some websites– all it takes is one GDPR cookies modal and an AI chat popup in the bottom right corner– and that's already way more frustration than my brain can handle.
I really do not like cookie consent popups! I've installed extensions to try and block them, oh and you know what else I try and block? Those AI overlays that say they're trying to make the web more accessible. Because they really aren't doing the thing they say they're supposed to be doing.
Consider PaleMoon - http://www.palemoon.org/ - it is multi-platform and has support for an older version of uBlock Origin and that works fine.
Another alternative is to use Brave Browser
Using any Chromium browser supports Google's goal of controlling all web standards
Wdym? It’s also a chromium browser i.e. it’ll lose uBlock as well eventually
"For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix"
Why take the word of the developers of a Chromium-based browser, some of whom may not even be part of the project in the long run? Firefox is built on an entirely different engine and doesn't have this problem.
Why do you think this would happen? Brave incorporates ublock as part of their Rust based adblocking library https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
Because eventually there will be enough changes to the upstream Chromium codebase that the only way to keep these extensions working would be to stop following upstream, which would mean massively increased development costs.
But they don't do adblocking with ublock, so it'll be safe
Chrome is going to continue supporting v2 extensions for enterprise users, so presumably it'll be pretty trivial to keep support for everyone else.
Google says that's only going to last one additional year, not forever.
They don't use ublock.
Brave has a native ad blocker built in, so it's unaffected by changes in the extension API.
I do this, and run Ubo on top of it. Mostly for social media tracking purposes.
And catch another chromium 0day, good idea
same, but it does have a warning: "This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions."
No, it does not. Firefox still fully supports those manifest v2 handles.
People keep saying that and it's true. Also every extension on firefox that I installed said "I need permission to do whatever i want with your browser", which made me really uncomfortable
My response was to a comment that it's still available on chrome store. I no longer see that comment.
Assuming it was deleted, does HN change parent comments if parent was deleted? - that's misleading.
I didn't comment on firefox at all.
> "My response was to a comment that it's still available on chrome store. I no longer see that comment.
> Assuming it was deleted, does HN change parent comments if parent was deleted? - that's misleading."
That's not possible as far as i know; What is possible, is that the original commenter EDITED their comment to a different text, soon after they posted it.
Afaik deleted comments do not affect the hierarchy - comments are still shown as children of a comment that is marked as deleted and has no content.
It sure looks like you replied to the wrong comment by accident.
Link seems to be incorrect, should be: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/s/dGGy8PXAMG (www.reddit.com, not old.reddit.com)
Which is this now removed post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1fhsai3/rest_in_pea...
That had the title "Rest in peace" and contained this image: https://i.redd.it/ng75ptntl2pd1.png
Which is a screenshot of the uBlock Origin page in the Chrome Web Store, displaying the message "This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.": https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
Yeah you do have to reconstitute old reddit links, although I just let the script take me there. The userscript I'm using that is.
Just to be clear:
OP likely copied the this share link first and then manually replaced www. to old. . But shared link never worked with old. prefix so it broke.
Reddit may or may not want to kill old.reddit but this isn't an example of it, inb4 people are going to take this opportunity to soapbox about it.
As I understand it, HN itself automatically rewrites www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com in submitted links. This works for direct links to posts and comments, but not share links (containing "/s/" in the path) like the one for this post.
the share /s/ links come from the new reddit, and are a sure way to spot someone using that interface instead of the proper one.
Ah thanks, I had no idea HN processes links. Sorry for assuming it was the OP.
My guess is that the user took the screenshot from a Chrome Beta/Dev/Canary build which is following an accelerated timeline for disabling Manifest V2 extensions [1].
Also, note that there is an enterprise policy that can enable Manifest V2 extensions through June 2025 [2].
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
[2]: https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#ExtensionManifestV...
Still, time to swap brower rather than prolonging it.
I've used Firefox for the most part. Only use Chrome for dev. If Firefox has a better dev experience, I'm all in but not holding my breath.
What are some dev features in chrome not present in ff? Just curious what I’m missing out
It's called lying for clicks.
uBlock Origin Lite is available here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
It does the same basic content blocking with no permissions required. Then you can opt-in sites for it to do more blocking, including I believe opt-ing in all sites for what appears to be the same blocking as regular uBlock Origin.
Positive side: faster, fewer permissions by default, more control over permissions.
Negatives: less blocked by default, requires opt-in for more blocking.
Another negative is it can only update the filter rules with an extension update (which Google controls the speed of). As far as I know, it hasn't been a problem yet but the fact that YouTube ad blocking started requiring frequent filter list updates suggests Google will likely take advantage of this.
FYI Google recently introduced queue skipping when only the filter rules were updated. In theory, updates should then be available immediately: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/skip-review?hl=en
As long as Google wills it, but that isn't really something that improves my "security".
This is also about not getting sucked into an unwanted environment managed by Google.
I was browsing some website this morning and noticed it had "shit" plastered all over it. Turns out those where ads, something I hadn't seen like that in quite some time.
Checking my Chrome extensions, uBlock origin is gone.
In my view there has been enough successful attacks which used ad networks to launch the attacks that I consider ad blocking primarily as my first line of defense.
For example, some years ago here in Norway a fairly popular site got their ad network exploited to serve an exploit which installed malware that hijacked the pages of the largest bank. When you think you sent money to your kids or paid a bill, you ended up sending the money somewhere else entirely.
So for me, it just isn't worth the risk, and I won't surf without an ad blocker.
I see it, and it shows up as installable, at https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
Do you see the message that it will soon be unavailable? It's installable for me, with the following warning:
>This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.
Yes, I see that message. It's been there for awhile I think.
Are you visiting not from Chrome?
No, I visited from a Chrome profile that doesn't have it installed.
Are there any good solutions for reliably rolling out an pre-review/unreviewed Chrome extension to a team (other than controlling all their users' Chrome profiles with an enterprise deployment)?
I found https://docs.plasmo.com/itero but haven't used it - it seems to provide a downloadable installer that installs and maintains an extension on testers' systems via policies. Unsure how well it works though, or if anyone's deployed it.
There are so many things wrong with the state of affairs with the MV3 rollout that it's hard to know where to begin. If there's a silver lining here, perhaps it's that there will be renewed attention towards finding workarounds to the walled garden.
Forcing advertisements on everyone is about so much more than money.
It is about money too obviously. I just think the general public is unaware what ads and ad network control over your online experience actually can accomplish.
After seeing aspects of it weaponized against me, the impact it has on someone unaware of the technology and psychology involved honestly seems like a danger to the public itself.
This may sound extreme if you have not experienced it.
So what is the exact impact? I keep hearing claims that advertising is bad, but never an actual example of an impact - something concrete.
Ads to me are merely a nuisance, and annoys me, rather than impact me in any dangerous way. Of course, i will do my utmost to remove it from my life, but i cannot see it be called a danger to the public. Calling it such will actually diminish the importance of other public dangers, such as lobbying, monopolistic corporations etc.
You mean public harm other than tracking you across the entire web, profiling your personality, adservers getting hacked and serving malware, taking up cpu cycles and memory, stealing your attention which are experiences which are life?
Like CIA-funded propaganda for political outcomes?
I remember people arguing that manifest v3 would be a security improvement.
Disregarding reality, this is already quite subjective and depends if you trust sites more than your browser addons.
Tracking doesn't seem to be a relevant threat to those that defend this "evolution".
Also disregarded is the shitty situation of mobile OS that disempower otherwise quite powerful devices that Google would like to extend to web browsers.
Yes, you can fully construct a hypothetical situation where manifest v3 can be an improvement. Just like chastity belts shield your from STDs.
The same bunch of bullshit can be extended to ideas about "web integrity". I think it is time that people stop being idiots about it.
Google is really an awful company at this point. We need to build some viable competitor to the anchors they still have.
Firefox and Brave are fine as chrome alternatives. Google search is dying a slow death. We need a viable alternative to YouTube.
I dread Google getting a new lease on life through Waymo.
I just paid for a subscription to phind.com it is extremely useful for most of my search needs. I don't use Google search at all
I also have been using Edge as my main browser in Linux (it's vertical tabs have no match for my usecase) .
At this point? They have been for a very long time. We saw this first hand when they almost single-handedly crushed Windows phone by essentially keeping them out of their walled garden. That was back in about 2010.
That was when I swore off them as much as possible. Not because "poor Microsoft is hurt" but because they showed the kind of power they could flex on others. I only use them for the occasional youtube video, nothing else.
The Nokia Lumia was a terrible trainwreck. Microsoft could've done a better job, but they didn't. In hindsight, Nokia had just launched an incredible smartphone with a Debian-based OS and 2 years later they sealed a deal with Microsoft to make MS-Windows the new OS. Pretty good timing for Microsoft to kill off what they really hate. Especially considering that Ballmer was still their CEO at the time and he's known for saying "developers" a lot and calling Linux a cancer.
The thing that made Google evil at that time for me is when they introduced Google+. Before they launched it, you could sign up with fake names and they didn't care. G+ changed that. Nowadays they're making it impossible to register without a valid cell phone number.
Given that Brave is chrome-based, and Brave won't stand for ad-blockers being disabled, I wonder what they're planning.
I do find uBlock Origin to be better than Brave's built-in blocker.
I expect they'll adopt Manifest v3, and it'll mean the end of UBo, but they'll still have their own built in adblocker working. They'll just need to maintain that and where it fits in with the Chrome codebase.
On Twitter they claimed they are still supporting v2.
Is it not in their own interest to be the only ad blocker?
I'm not sure why it would be in their own interest to be the only ad blocker. What do they gain by not allowing other ad blockers?
It elevates them into the "main protagonist", and I'm not necessarily against that, I just don't want ads shoved down my throat.
What is worst, mods deleting this reddit post or google blocking UBO?
Probably because it’s misleading? Still available
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin/cjpal...
r/Piracy mods are compromised[1], one was recently caught accepting payments in exchange for hosting malicious sites on the megathread
Victims' posts get downvoted to invisiblity because it's reddit.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1evqxed/delete_this...
Surprising nobody has mentioned Zen Browser in this thread?
Does anyone else have everything zen renders being blurry?
Firefox mobile allows you to install extensions, including uBlock Origin. I've been using it on my phone for the past few months and it's been great. Firefox in general is great.
What's a good alternative Blink or Webkit browser? Meaning not Firefox (too many issues in my experience, and built-in ads are annoying, and I don't trust Mozilla).
Orion[1] (by Kagi) is sweet (but not without its own issues). Based on Webkit, supports vertical tabs, etc. But the big one: allows side-loading Chrome / Firefox extensions!
Awesome, thank you! Once Manifest v3 is officially live, I'll probably end up ditching Chrome and Google Search altogether.
Give me decent multi-profile support in firefox and I won't need a chromium browser anymore
Multi-profile support has been in FF since I started using it (at least 5 years ago?). The profile picker isn't as pretty as the Chrome window you get but its definitely there.
My biggest gripe with multi-profile support is that it mixes the taskbar icons in windows. There's a multi-step workaround that involves the registry and cloning programs files folders to fix this specific issue but you need to do it for each new profile and it breaks constantly with updates and doesn't work consistently even in between updates. Yes, containers solve some of the problems that chrome profiles attempt to solve but I still have a work profile and personal profile which I like to keep separate.
Unless there's a way to create containers that also disable extensions in their context I will always need multiple profiles.
> My biggest gripe with multi-profile support is that it mixes the taskbar icons in windows.
edit: never mind, I wasn't awake, see reply.
FWIW on Windows this works fine for me. I run two different profiles. I get two separate taskbar icon groupings, they stay together and collapses independently.
Must admit I've not used multiple profiles on my KDE install yet.
KDE Plasma (6) user - Firefox Multiple Profiles.
It's been far too long since I set it up, so I forget if I had to duplicate the application, if you do mine uses these settings:
I prefer to NOT group windows so I can sort them manually, but also, offhand, because I believe it groups off of the executable name, not the profile.Firefox Profile Manager firefox --new-instance --ProfileManagerIf you right click on the Icons-and-Text Task Manager Settings, the Behavior tab has TWO options for Group: behaviors [Do Not Group] (I prefer this anyway) or [By Program Name] which I take to mean the executable. I'm not sure if it follows symlinks, but if that's an issue you can probably make a script to hardlink instead. A couple firefox-profilename applications that point back to firefox should work. You can even make a custom version of the launcher that invokes with a specific profile ID rather than selecting one.
As a further set of asides:
Firefox please 1) It'd be nice if firefox renamed it's arguments list to prefix it with the selected profile ID as the first item.
KDE Plasma please 2) It would be great if the grouping thing could be expanded to E.G. consume the program name + first two tokens of the arguments. Maybe with a customization per group.
KDE mega _please_ 2.b) Or even just to call an external program with a window ID handle and have it write back a string that's used as the group 'name'.
Actually I realized I totally forgot a crucial detail. I run my other profile using Firefox Beta, so they really are separate applications. I assume that would fully explain why they behave separately. Sorry about that.
Will have to test using multiple profiles using the same executable.
However, if the same "trick" works on Linux, perhaps it could be exploited by Firefox creating a separate executable that launches a specific profile.
We do that with our application, using the "self-extracting zip trick", ie appending data to the executable that is read during start-up.
Firefox couldn't do the link thing itself without either being a setuid binary, or running somewhere the user could replace Firefox. You could MAYBE get it to make a symlink under XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, or /tmp if that's unset, since symlinks work across devices. At least on my desktop /tmp is allowed to contain executables and a symlink to /usr/bin/bash executes and remains named as the symlink path.
Though it'd still be many times better if Firefox made it easier to tell which profile was associated with a given process (prefix the argument list as if launched with that). ALSO if KDE's task list supported improved flexibility for group categorization. It wouldn't even need to run an external program other than once for each new window created.
I've also been using it for years, and it seems to work exactly how it should, but it does seem to be a bit of a "hidden feature" in my opinion. It wasn't super easy to figure out that the feature existed and how to use it.
There’s also containers, which probably covers 90% of use cases for profiles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
FF profiles do work.
The problem is discoverability and UX. I believe, in chrome profile management is another menu option. In FF you have to use about:profiles or start Firefox with a specific command line argument.
Unless you know about it or are actively looking for the feature, there's no way to know. If you are coming from Chrome, this unfortunately leaves the impression that Firefox doesn't support profiles (a must have feature for some).
It doesn't even hint or show up in settings search. It is as if they don't want anyone to use/know about profiles.
CEO doing her job, making sure they stay feature impoverished to keep the funds flowing.
Have you looked into Firefox Multi-Account Containers[1]?
It met all my needs for multiple profiles. I use it to have multiple concurrent sessions for different sites (eg: one AWS account/role per container).
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
This ^
Where I work we are required to have 2-3 Microsoft accounts for security separation. Account containers makes it possible to interact with virtually unlimited profiles all in the same browser window. No need for in-private browsing or multiple widows of chrome or edge, it just works. When you have it configured just right it's a thing of beauty.
Container tabs are the main think that keep me on FF (well LibreWolf) rather than switching to Brave. I find them indispensable.
Run with -P flag
Don’t know of a keyboard hotkey during launch for this, I keep a separate desktop shortcut to run w/ the profile manager. You can also make shortcuts to run with a specific profile.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions#-Profile...
You can also manage profiles by typing about:profiles in address bar
Mozilla announced a few months ago they were working on Tab Groups, Vertical Tabs, Profile Management. I don't know if it's related but seemed to coincide with getting a new CEO.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
nah, they are busy building screenshot, pocket, AI chatbot
Apart from personal opinions, is there any evidence this is due to Google sabotaging uBlock rather than a legitimate technical concern (V2 vs V3 manifest)?
Could uBlock implement V3 without losing its functionality?
> Apart from personal opinions, is there any evidence this is due to Google sabotaging uBlock rather than a legitimate technical concern (V2 vs V3 manifest)?
Google is an ads company. uBlock Origin is making them lose money...
> Could uBlock implement V3 without losing its functionality?
No, that's why everyone is angry and a ton of people switching to Firefox, to keep using uBlock Origin as it is, since Firefox still respects the V2.
> Could uBlock implement V3 without losing its functionality?
no. V3 has some limitations on how many urls gets blocked, and has to be submitted ahead of time iirc.
It is high time the tech commmunity strongly encourage their friends and family to switch to firefox enmass.
> Could uBlock implement V3 without losing its functionality?
Yes, with some minor caveats. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
There is no technical improvement of V3. It is simply about shifting common capabilities of browsers away from you (aka the security threat) towards Google (that is an ultra safe ad supplier).
And this is part of it. Maybe releasing manifest v4 with prominent forks would lessen this purely marketing move by Google.
here is an idea: take the power away from google and browsers and let's go back to a desktop/native solution of intercepting all network traffic. Browsers can't resist that, because corporate networks need to do TLS inspection (sometimes, they are legally required to do so).
Another idea is, for the filtering system to operate a shadow DOM or an entire browser (like a selenium driver) that renders everything unfiltered. But the browser the user is using only sees filtered content. That way, it would become significantly more difficult for advertisers to detect the AD is being blocked. This could be done in a local sandbox and optionally in a cloud sandbox. Outbound network requests from the user facing browser can be blocked or filtered.
Or, just use Firefox. but I doubt Mozilla can resist doing the same thing, given the anti-trust issues Google is facing.
IMO, TLS inspection is an even bigger security risk than malware from ads is.
even locally, in a sandbox, written in rust, audited, the whole security theatrics included?
I wonder how many will switch to Firefox after this action. But it may be a small number because I assume that not many people use adblockers and most of those who use them already had Firefox, but I may be wrong.
please stop using google anything
not using Youtube would put me back like 300 years.
not sure how ublock origin works but would it be possible to take the block list from ublock origin and block at router level?
No. A lot of uBlock's filters are applied based on properties of a request, or even of the context of that request. which aren't available outside the browser.
Nope. It also cut a lot of content based on CSS and HTML rules.
I wish they offered a paid version of the browser that would have ublock enabled.
This link wants me to login.
Guys, this is (currently) not true. Please check for yourselves.
Checked Chrome Web Store using Brave, it's still there.
Just to be clear here, the FBI recommends adblock.
Just to be clear here, ad blocking is still possible on Chrome.
on another note, they won’t let you into the reddit unless you are logged in, which I just realized by clicking on the link :(
Brave still works with the older plugins.
being redirected to submit a link...
Same. Link needs to be updated -
https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1fhsai3/rest_in_pea...
and the reddit post is behind a login wall, ha ha. The enshittification continues.
This is just a broken link that leads to a post creation form. Can’t create posts unless you’re logged on.
Oh, wow, and this is for the old Reddit site, too.