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  • ArchRecord@lemm.eeEnglish
    87·
    4 months ago

    Adblockers are the largest consumer boycott in history.

    Google isn’t just disabling an extension, they’re attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.

  • VantaBrandon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    872·
    4 months ago

    IT guys will stop using it…

    Which means they’ll stop deploying it as the default browser on some large enterprises, it won’t ship as defaults in pre-baked images going forward.

    Average joes and janes will use Safari and Edge depending on OS.

    Where is their growth going to come from after this change? Chromebooks? lol.

    I hope they do it, it will hurt them in the long run.

    You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.

    • cmhe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      155·
      4 months ago

      IT guys will stop using it…

      No, they will not, if they didn’t already. Because convenience it key.

      The browser war is over, and humans lost, corporations won. Google and other huge corporations control the biggest websites and most of the access to content on the internet.

      They just need to make it inconvenient to use ad-blocking browsers.

      They built their business on advertiser gambling, which seem to be flawed concept, because they keep on squeezing that tube for every penny more and more, in a race to the bottom.

      But they are still in control of both browers and content so they have options to keep squeezing more.

      So you want to use a ad blocker? Well, the browser that supports them might not be white listed (anymore) by the bot detector, and you have to solve captchas on every site you visit, until you come to your senses and use a browser, where ad blocking is no longer possible.

      Oh, and all that is ok, because of “security”. Because letting the users be in control of their devices and applications is “in-secure”. They are just doing that to protect you from spam and scams, just trust them! Trust them, because they don’t trust you!

      • VantaBrandon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Its not the IT guys themselves, its the aggregate influence. One large school campus flips the switch to Firefox on their next image deployment its a drop in a bucket, but when 1000 schools, 2000 government agencies and 5000 businesses all suddenly stop using Chrome the graph starts to move, because laypeople just accept the default.

        IT guys are like browser-influencers, they tell their parents what to use, friends, and so on. We all used to recommend Chrome, I don’t anymore.

  • ChonkaLoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    831·
    4 months ago

    Thank you Google I hope shitty moves like this drives enough people away to better browsers like Firefox. It desperately needs a bigger market share.

    • Plopp@lemmy.worldEnglish
      92·
      4 months ago

      Not only a bigger market share. What’s keeping Firefox alive is the financial support they get from Google. If enough people move from Chrome to Firefox without Firefox also securing finances from elsewhere, Google could easily kill Firefox by just not giving them money and we’d all be left with just Chromium.

      • lemmyhavesome@lemmy.worldEnglish
        19·
        4 months ago

        I think the real reason Google is funding Firefox is because they’re afraid of being targeted in antitrust lawsuits. As long as Firefox is around, they have someone they can point to, to say they’re not a monopoly.

    • voluble@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      I hear the term ‘broken up’ a lot in media and discourse, but it’s never explained. In your eyes, what actually happens when a government ‘breaks up’ a corporation? I mean, what are the steps, objectives, and outcomes?

      Not being adversarial, I’m just curious.

      • Verat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        I envision it like AT&T’s break-up, where the singular Google is broken up into regional companies that will (hopefully) have to compete with each other.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.worldEnglish
    60·
    4 months ago

    The modern Internet is completely unusable without an ad blocker. Way to remake ie6, Google!

  • Hal-5700X@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    591·
    4 months ago

    Yeah, we saw this coming. When Manifest v3 first talked about.

    Google an ad company are killing ad blockers. Yeah, that sounds right.

    • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      218·
      4 months ago

      MV3 doesn’t kill ad blockers. uBOL (uBlock Origin Lite) blocks ads, is by the same author and uses MV3. The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.

      Some of these “features” that classic uBO used are available in MV3 but requires different permissions. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging. The main uBO author though feels slighted by Google and went on a trash talking campaign against Google, and to be fair had a few good points. Anyway, most people on social media now care more about how Chromium and Firefox makes them feel now irregardless of facts. They think their emotions somehow are the same as facts.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        4 months ago

        The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.

        Then allow a savvy user to choose to keep MV2 mode via an opt-in control instead of depreciating years of hard work by non-malicious extension authors. uBlock Origin is, in fact, the ONLY browser extension I use in Chrome, as Firefox is my main browser.

        • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          4 months ago

          I agree they should have tried to find more ways to keep the old behavior. MV3 rollout has already been delayed for a long time, and now users merely get a message. I’m not sure that the community (mostly Google contributors) won’t give in or try to find a way to keep MV2. However, what was done with MV2 can now be done with MV3 with native messaging or other network tools… I think the concern is that allowing an exception makes it much easier for a malicious extension or software to get users to agree not realizing what they’re agreeing to. Furthermore, the declarative approach is actually preferable by many. You get most of the same features without exposing all your traffic to an extension.

      • Phoenix3875@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        4 months ago

        From my understanding, MV3 kills vital features of ad-blockers in that

        1. Some filtering rules do rely on the ability to read the content of the webpage, which can’t be migrated, per the FAQ linked in the article
        2. The declarative API means an update to the rules requires an update to the plugin itself, which might get delayed by the reviewing process, causing the blocker to lag behind the tracker. It might not be able to recover as quickly as uBO in the recent YouTube catch-up round.
        • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          4 months ago

          1. uBOL GitHub does a pretty good job of explaining some challenges, and some of them are better tracked in the issues.

          2. Your second point isn’t accurate though and MV3 does support dynamic rules.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        4 months ago

        And yet the likelihood of Google publishing a malicious extension is quite low. Not sure why you’re so adamant about defending their shitty anti-adblock actions, making excuses for a mega corporation.

        • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          4 months ago

          Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, Arch Linux, NixOS, Flathub, etc. all end up publishing malicious software in their stores and package managers. It is inevitable. If you’re not worried about sandboxing then you might as well proxy all your traffic using third party software.

  • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    531·
    4 months ago

    …Oh, no! Anyway. Just giving people one more reason to finally make the switch to Firefox or something different.

    Google Chrome warns about disabling uBlock Origin. I warn Google Chrome that they’re being a little bitch & they’re going to lose users.

  • VantaBrandon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    40·
    4 months ago

    Could turn out to be a good thing. All power users will dump Chrome practically overnight, a huge boon to the alternatives, that could actually give them enough momentum to compete with Google for a change. I’m sure they’ve considered this, probably an empty treat.

    • GoogleSellsAds@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      With the direction FF is taking it’s gonna be forks for now.

      The only thing that held me back from using LibreWolf over Firefox was that it disabled (automatic) dark mode on websites. I understand this is part of the “resist fingerprinting” configuration. There’s a workaround now ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732114).

      In about:config update these 3 preferences:

      • privacy.resistFingerprinting = false
      • privacy.fingerprintingProtection = true
      • privacy.fingerprintingProtection.overrides = +AllTargets,-CSSPrefersColorScheme
  • arthurpizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
    311·
    4 months ago

    They started putting ads in Windows, a few users switched, but most still continue Windows.

    Google will roll this out and a few users will switch, but most will just keep using Chrome.

    We’ve already established that most users don’t seem to care.

    • pete_the_cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      The reason for this is because switching from Windows to Linux is a lot bigger change, requiring a fair amount of technical know-how, and even knowing that Linux exists in the first place. Swapping browsers is easy in the technical sense, it’s breaking the habit that’s the hard part, but if they piss people off enough all it takes is uninstalling it in order to break the habit, not a drastic paradigm shift. I’m a long time Chrome user, like over a decade and with the recent “unverified download” nonsense unless you enable their invasive tracking has put me over the edge. I had both the Chrome and Firefox icons pinned to the taskbar and just out of habit kept clicking it, I finally removed it last week

    • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      I’m not so sure about that. Windows despite its ads is still generally usable or at least readable, but adblockers affect almost every website, and in a much more extreme way, without which renders some websites virtually unusable. As someone else said, installing another browser is also far easier than taking backups, installing an entirely new OS, implementing your backups, and learning an entire new OS which may not readily support the software you have licensed from windows for most users.

      Users care a lot about convenience. I expect that they weigh installing and learning linux etc as less convenient than the ads in windows which is why they would not switch, but I expect when it comes to this case, they would weigh installing a different browser with adblock as much more convenient than using the internet with ads on every single website.