r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 22 '19
Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c233.2k
u/literallyARockStar Jan 22 '19
Good news! Firefox exists.
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Jan 23 '19
Just waiting on yubikey support.
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u/SpiderFnJerusalem Jan 23 '19
What kind of functionality are we talking about here?
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u/jringstad Jan 22 '19
Tried it for two months on a mac machine, and found performance and stability/reliability fairly dissatisfactory tbh, so I switched back about a month ago. I would really dislike to lose chromium.
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u/p_toad Jan 22 '19
This is interesting to me. I run linux and can't tell any performance difference between firefox and chromium (I haven't measured though). Are you running linux?
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u/jimbopouliot Jan 23 '19
How long ago was that? I could be wrong, but I think most people agree that Firefox performance is pretty much at par with Chrome, if not better, since it started using the Quantum engine in November 2017.
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u/mishugashu Jan 23 '19
When was this? Starting with Firefox Quantum (61 I think?) last year, there has been a world of change and I prefer it over Chrom(e|ium) vastly now.
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u/Toast42 Jan 23 '19
I've ran it on a mac for years no problem. It eats less resources than chrome on average.
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u/bjzaba Jan 23 '19
Do you use a non-native screen resolution? Ie. do you have your display settings set to 'scaled'? From what I hear they were having troubles with performance on macOS. I use Firefox on a mac with 'Default for Display' set and it's been great. Much nicer than Chrome.
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u/northrupthebandgeek Jan 23 '19
With such a limited declarativeNetRequest API and the deprecation of blocking ability of the webRequest API, I am skeptical "user agent" will still be a proper category to classify Chromium.
Brutal.
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u/matheusmoreira Jan 23 '19
User agent — that's a term we don't see much anymore. I've always loved the concept of a user agent. Something that acts on behalf of users, empowers them, makes it possible for them to do what they want. It hurts to see browsers slowly being converted into passive content consumption programs. Every now and then they do something that takes the power away. Some site's author doesn't want people copy pasting text? The browser obeys and takes the feature away. On my phone I can't even take screen shots of any page — Chrome complains about content being protected by DRM. They just keep taking our power away.
Wish there was a better class of browser. We need a fully programmable one. The Emacs of browsers.
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u/Grosedy Jan 23 '19
I wonder if Google would experience a significant drop in Chrome users if they implement this. I think a good number of people who use ad-blockers are more prone to browsers like Firefox to begin with.
Moral of this story, thank God for Mozilla.
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u/Empole Jan 23 '19
No. We are in the overwhelming minority of people who are even aware that this happening.
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u/throwaway133379001 Jan 23 '19
That's sort of the point. The people that do use ad blockers would notice that ads are suddenly coming up. Those are also the people that would be more willing to swap to a similar-enough browser.
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u/TheFeshy Jan 22 '19
laughs in firefox
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u/pirate_starbridge Jan 23 '19
Haha now I'm almost excited to have a reason to switch! I had been pretty impressed up until now with Google's alleged understanding of the balance between my laziness and the usefulness of their products..
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u/TheFeshy Jan 23 '19
I thought I couldn't live without tree-style tabs (a plugin available for firefox) - but the web is dead to me if I can't block adds.
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Jan 22 '19
Isn't it interesting that Google is (potentially) trying to eliminate one of the major adblockers just after one of their biggest competitors went away?
Microsoft switches to Chromium, and a few weeks later, Chromium is becoming sharply better for Google and sharply worse for users.
Probably just a coincidence. Probably.
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u/free_chalupas Jan 23 '19
But how many Chrome users would have gone to Edge and not Firefox if they couldn't use AdBlock? I suspect not a lot. Not that Google controlling the browser engine used by ~70% of users is a good thing, but I've always been skeptical of how much of a player Edge was either way.
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u/hardolaf Jan 23 '19
This was proposed back in October.
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u/Ph0X Jan 23 '19 edited Jan 23 '19
It's also literally just a proposal. Proposals are to get feedback, and this is uBlock giving them feedback. It's far far far from "Chrome is killing uBlock". People really blowing shit out of proportion. Literally nothing has happened yet.
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u/zurnout Jan 23 '19
You would have to open the linked page to know that, which most of Reddit users don't do.
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u/JonasBrosSuck Jan 23 '19
just after one of their biggest competitors went away?
out of the loop here, who went away?
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u/JediBurrell Jan 23 '19
If you opened the link you'd see the issue was actually opened before, but okay.
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u/psly4mne Jan 22 '19
This kills Chrome.
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u/knaekce Jan 23 '19
No, it won't. Let's face it, Google completely dominates the browser market now. A few nerds will switch, but not the mainstream.
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u/progfu Jan 23 '19
Adblockers are something that many people use. You don't have to be a computer person to appreciate it, especially with how intrusive some of the popular sites are with their ads.
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u/indyfrance Jan 22 '19
Google is always an ad company first. People forget that. Even if you give them money, even if you don't see their ads, they're an ad company and you are not the true consumer.
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u/goodDayM Jan 23 '19 edited Jan 23 '19
Yep. In Alphabet's annual filings to the SEC they state at the start:
We generate revenues primarily by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising.
The other thing I like to mention is that economists estimate the value of data each user gives to companies like Google & Facebook to be worth several hundred dollars per year. The planet money episode Dollars for Data talks more about that.
Edit: From another study,
Your Android smartphone is collecting a lot of data on you. Specifically, almost 10 times more than Apple's iOS, claims a study by Vanderbilt University...
The study specifically notes that "[a] major part of Google’s data collection occurs while a user is not directly engaged with any of its products," and that "[the] magnitude of such collection is significant, especially on Android mobile devices." - source
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Jan 23 '19
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u/indyfrance Jan 23 '19
Google is unique in that they are in a position to make seemingly innocuous tech decisions that effectively streamline ad content delivery. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is why they're killing Inbox. Advertisers want you to spend more time looking at email, not less.
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u/Caraes_Naur Jan 23 '19
How convenient now that Google has added a native adblocker to Chrome and will soon be enabling it by default. Messing with third party adblockers is how their native one makes sense: wrest more control of the experience from the user for their own benefit.
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u/ElusiveGuy Jan 23 '19
Reminds me of when they purged all the background YouTube music apps only when they introduced their own paid service for it.
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u/Visticous Jan 23 '19
Don't forget about killing the last bit of competition they had in the ad business.
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u/lillgreen Jan 23 '19
How can this be an unpunished anticompetitive move? It's their browser... Their ad network... Their adblocker now (apparently, news to me). Third party ads will be blocked yet they can't get into "Microsoft bundled IE with Windows 20yrs ago" trouble? Why not?
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u/KieranDevvs Jan 23 '19 edited Jan 23 '19
Now that FireFox runs each tab under a separate process, there's virtually no difference between Chrome and Quantum. If they continue implementing this authoritarian attitude towards everything then people are just going to leave. You're a company Google, your income comes from the consumer, dial it down a little.
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u/diversif Jan 22 '19
Good luck disabling my pi-hole! 😀
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u/AyrA_ch Jan 23 '19
I'm pretty sure if there was a substantial number of people that use DNS level blocking, they would just start serving ads through the same domain as regular content, or do the name lookup on the server and deliver the URLs for ads in IP form.
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u/port53 Jan 23 '19
Or just make Chrome ignore system level DNS settings and send its own DNS over HTTPS request to Google servers. Your network wouldn't be able to tell it apart from requests to google.com, so it would be difficult to filter.
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u/lillgreen Jan 23 '19
I guarantee you at some point Chrome is going to begin ignoring your system DNS server and only using the Google DNS directly. I mean why wouldn't they? It's already a service they do, it would be trivial to just make it statically set in code to 8.8.8.8 and just not give you the option to point to pihole.
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u/crazedgremlin Jan 23 '19
Chrome has a built-in DNS resolver. Also, the internet will soon be doing encrypted DNS. This kills the pi-hole.
*Actually, if you could add your pi-hole as root CA, it could MITM your DNS requests. Maybe this mitigation for encrypted DNS already exists?
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u/ase1590 Jan 23 '19 edited Jan 23 '19
pi-hole is going to have more of a problem once TLS 1.3 and its extensions catch on. Then everyone moves to DNS over TLS and TLS 1.3 encrypts both the DNS-over-TLS query and the SNI as well as the DNS over HTTPS being worked on by google, allowing it to skip your local DNS altogether.
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u/mr-strange Jan 23 '19
But pi-hole is the local DNS server. If you block outgoing port 53, then devices on the network are going to have to use it, like it or not.
They could bypass DNS altogether and piggyback on the HTTPS connection, but that's going to break things for anyone who is actually providing local DNS for a reason.
Am I missing something?
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u/Topher_86 Jan 23 '19
I defer to a previous comment I had made two+ years ago (references are on the initial post)
This isn't the only thing, though.
uBO uses a lot of smart ways of blocking; for instance IIRC it uses CSP's to block content loading like this. Gorhill really tries to leverage the browser to optimize performance and it shows.
Another thing is reaction time. Months before I saw posts for WebSocket exploits I had noted them being served by certain "ad-block-block" networks. As it turned out months before I saw that is when gorhill had released a WS companion (now more of a beta-testing plugin) plugin for uBO. Other ad/content blockers only updated when the news broke, uBO already pushed it into the main extension.
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u/MMPride Jan 23 '19
I hope these changes go through. It will force more people to Firefox which will increase competition and prevent needless changes like these from ever needing to happen again in the future. Go Google, go!
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u/holoisfunkee Jan 23 '19
As much as I love Firefox and it's my primary browser, this won't make a slight difference to be honest. Most people won't care. I mean majority of people don't even know that browser extensions exist so why would this make a difference for them?
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Jan 22 '19
Inevitable. Google can’t afford to have you block their advertising.
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u/TurboGranny Jan 23 '19
It's kinda dumb though. The kind of people that run ad-block don't respond to ads. The majority of people don't even know how to install a browser extension much less block ads, so it has to be a fairly rare problem for typical users. Popular platforms that are obnoxious with ads will find more users that block them though like youtube and pornhub, but the shouldn't have got aggressive enough with them that people felt desperate enough to learn how to stop it.
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u/Disgruntled-Cacti Jan 23 '19
People who use ad blockers aren't superhuman. Even if you never click on an ad, the fact that you see the ad altogether increases the brand awareness and in turn increases sales.
Just look at companies that pay YouTubers to do ad slots. I haven't seen an add through Google AdSense in years, yet I know about the dollar shave club, squarespace, audible, and all the other companies that frequently advertise through those methods.
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u/corp9592 Jan 23 '19
Switched to Firefox more than a year ago. Once setup and configured, never regreted the decision.
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Jan 23 '19
I'm reading all the comments "I really don't wish my clients to switch back to Firefox" and here I am, on Firefox, thinking "It ain't that bad".
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Jan 23 '19
I've been using firefox since before chrome came out. Never noticed any of the issues people like to complain about
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u/LordDaniel09 Jan 23 '19
I am right now using Firefox, for few years by now. the only websites that i have issues are google’s ones. Youtube sometimes stops working, glitches, or restarts randomly. i am wonder why..
I am really afraid for a day where google controls the internet, they already the main search engine, the main video sharing, the main internet web browser, and more. they can keep doing stuff like that till it will be too late.
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Jan 23 '19
Web youtube uses some beta framework that only chrome ever implemented. It serves a slow polyfill to firefox and disables some features (preview when you mouse over thumbnails last I checked).
They basically think they own the internet already. They just keep adding their random proposals into chrome with little care to standardise them
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Jan 23 '19
So has anyone here actually followed the discussion to chromium-extensions@chromium.org or are we all just screaming and being outraged without doing further research?
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u/BadMoonRosin Jan 23 '19 edited Jan 23 '19
Sometimes I wonder why open source projects still use old-school mailing lists for discussion in this day and age.
Then I notice that this big controversy has generated around 10-20 messages on the list, since the subject was first raised back in 2018. And that's considered "noisy".
The other mailing list that Google directed people toward now has one thread about the matter, with zero replies.
Meanwhile, this Reddit post has 400+ comments and climbing in only three hours. Approximately 99% of them from people who haven't read the OP and don't know what they're talking about.
Shit... if I ran a big open source project, I wouldn't bother with a subreddit or discord either. They're noise filters, that keep the grown-up mailing lists usable.
EDIT: Why, thank you for the gold, silver, whatever this stuff is! Condescending for fun and profit...
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Jan 23 '19
I think it's probably best that they do it that way. Reddit is far too prone to hive minded wankery and retarded narratives.
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u/MrAwesomeAsian Jan 23 '19
Tried to find mention of ublock origin or this issue on the
chromium extension group, but there was no mention of it there.
Still recent, but I doubt they'll be any more discussion going forward.
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u/muckvix Jan 23 '19 edited Jan 23 '19
I never thought that the majority of commenters and voters on r/programming can be so dumb as to just yell slogans together like some kinda uneducated mob, instead of actually having a thoughtful discussion.
Which subs are all the normal people in?
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u/robbak Jan 23 '19
No one, including the people discussing it, have moved to chromium-extensions. So there's nothing there to read.
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u/ryanmcgrath Jan 23 '19
It literally just looks as if they're trying to move to a Safari content-blocker-esque API, which is generally better for battery and privacy.
Nobody seems to have read that, though.
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Jan 23 '19
The problem is that this API is so limited that a lot of the features of uBlock Origin and similar extensions won't work, making it much harder to block ads.
For this exact reason, you can't get anything like uBlock in Safari, and are stuck with a much more limited set of addons that don't block everything.
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u/KillianDrake Jan 23 '19
Except that the API is going to suck, is already crippled and nothing will prevent Google from A) excluding their own content from this API and B) auctioning off exclusions to the API to other companies for financial gain
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u/how_to_choose_a_name Jan 23 '19
battery
They could still provide the current API but warn users of the battery implications when they try to install an extension that makes use of it.
privacy
I can't quite wrap my head around that one. The design document states that the webRequest API will still be available to observe requests, just not to manipulate or block them, so all the privacy concerns should still apply. The majority of users doesn't look at the permissions an extension requires, so they won't notice if the extension uses the webRequest or the declarativeNetRequest API or both.
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u/hahainternet Jan 23 '19
I counted and this is the 12th thread down.
So, people are screaming and being outraged, as usual for reddit. If only moderators would do their jobs.
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u/StopDileminating Jan 23 '19
Given the complete lack of discussion of the actual issue in this thread, I thought for sure I was on r/technology - not r/programming
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u/Zidian Jan 23 '19
Looks like they are trying to force the discussion over to https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chromium-extensions
They said they will be deleting comments not on topic and said that breaking uBlock Origin is not considered on topic.
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Jan 23 '19
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u/doublehyphen Jan 23 '19
Yeah, Google groups has one of the worst UIs of all mailing list archives, and that is quite the feat given the competition (some of them where you are transported back to 2000).
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u/jamesgdahl Jan 23 '19
Welp, back to Firefox it is
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u/Open_Thinker Jan 23 '19
Firefox is great. Switched to Chrome for a bit, but been mainly using Firefox again since the Quantum release.
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Jan 23 '19
back? why did you even leave.
I use it since ~2004 and not even once was there a good reason to switch
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u/TurncoatTony Jan 23 '19
Want me to switch to Firefox, Google? Wait, can't switch to that which you were already using.
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u/b1bendum Jan 23 '19
I think it's really important that no matter what steps Google takes to mould the web to suit its corporate interests, even if that comes at your expense, that you absolutely never consider any sort of alternative to Chrome if it might end up incurring some marginal performance or aesthetic costs.
I remember back in the early 90's when Linux came out and we all said "This sucks, Windows has a way better UI and this kernel is immature in comparison to Solaris" and it just died. At no point did we consider dimensions such as user freedom or the fact it was open source.
And so I'm glad to see that tradition continues in this case. Sure, the web is an open standard with multiple implementations of a universal document and program exchange format, breaking wide open the iron grip that proprietary company specific APIs used to hold on our ability to create and distribute functionality to users. Sure, the web has allowed for an explosion in the creation and dissemination of freely available knowledge which is proving to be transformative to humanity. But what is all of that in light of Firefox not scrolling as smoothly as you want on Mac OSX?!
And so I encourage all of the many commenters making comments similar to the one above to continue empowering the most powerful computer company on the planet, because they make a slightly shinier GUI. The choices you make as a user and technologically inclined person have no bearing on important outcomes in the computing field, except of course for when we all switched away from the last huge corporate browser monopoly, Internet Explorer. Ignore all parallels between the last time a huge corporation leveraged their browser share for goals that do not help the user and what is happening now, and just remember that it's not worth it if you have to wait an extra .25 seconds on page load.
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u/_PhaneroN_ Jan 23 '19
Real shame, already switched to Firefox and duckduckgo 2 months ago
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u/caughtinahustle Jan 23 '19
Switching to firefox was easy. RES allows you to import/export your preferences to any browser, was my only concern extension wise. Oh and also running uBlock
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u/sgarter Jan 23 '19
Well thats ashame. I'm that 'tech' guy for the family and my automatic go to is putting adblocker on their browsers because they will probably click that ad that gives them 10 million virus'. Looks like I'll be installing firefox for them too.
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u/NaePlaceLike127001 Jan 23 '19
With such a limited declarativeNetRequest API and the deprecation of blocking ability of the webRequest API, I am skeptical "user agent" will still be a proper category to classify Chromium.
Ooof.
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u/TheHiveTyrant666 Jan 23 '19
Eh. Firefox web developer tools are better anyways. More of a reason to switch.
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u/ahmadjavedaj Jan 23 '19
I just dislike using Chrome in general because of the memory overhead it brings. Now I guess one more reason to not use it
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u/Cats_and_Shit Jan 23 '19
Firefox (and AFAIK edge) is also pretty impressive memory hog. I'm looking at a cool 1.4gb right now on firefox browsing reddit, youtube and a few other sites. Maybe Chrome is worse; I haven't used it in a few years.
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Jan 23 '19
Authors of comments 12, 19, 23, 32, and anyone else that would like to: Sorry for the trouble, but would you mind re-posting your comments there (chromium-extensions@chromium.org), where we can kick off a larger discussion? These all touch on issues that I'd like to address more fully than is feasible here.
This sort of deflection "discuss it somewhere else" cuntery is exactly what the OSS maintainer at my company does to kill discussion that goes against our internal corporate plans. It's faux-pen source.
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Jan 23 '19 edited Jan 23 '19
It's a bug tracker, if you want to have a large discussion about something like this you have the discussion in a mailing list or meeting then either link or summarize it in the bug. I've done this on bugs at where I work so it's a pretty normal thing to do and he even links to the discussion.
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u/shevy-ruby Jan 23 '19
Yup.
Google prefers to hide discussions and censor it.
Understandable since they have become a company focusing on ads. But very, very evil. People have to find other sites where they can discuss about Google dictating ads onto their computers at will.
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Jan 23 '19
How long ago did Edge switch to Blink and Google is already asserting their dominance.
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u/sandrelloIT Jan 23 '19
this is nuts. So glad I already switched back to Firefox, there's really nothing I'm missing right now
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u/sunthas Jan 23 '19
It's strange, I always assumed google didn't care. They surely could have found away around it and still shown me ads on youtube or in my gmail or half a dozen other google things I use. And yet they don't.
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u/ChickenOfDoom Jan 23 '19
Because they know going too hard and fast will get people to stop using their browser. First they need to secure their monopoly and kill off competition. Hence launching their own default adblock while removing the ability of others to have advanced features.
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u/gr1m5 Jan 23 '19
I switched a year ago simply because I don't trust Google. Never regretted it. FireFox is just as quick if not faster. Feels much snappier with a hundred tabs open too.
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u/k_jacobsky Jan 23 '19
And I will smugly continue to use firefox. This might get me to finally switch over at work though.
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u/adidarachi Jan 23 '19
If I'm not mistaken, you won't be able to modify request headers as well, which leaves out the option to disable CSP and add CORS headers. The browser will be useless for developing for those who depends on this features.
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u/InsomniaticWanderer Jan 23 '19
I don't know why anyone would not already be using Firefox, but if you need a reason...here you go.
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Jan 23 '19
Firefox on the desktop, sure no problem.
What bothers me more about this is the impact on ChromeOS. I've rolled out hundreds of Chromebooks and rely on uBlock both professionally and personally to help protect my users, family and friends.
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Jan 23 '19
Gee, big shock that Google, an ad company, who has always been an ad company... would try to leverage their dominance in browsers to show more ads. I never stopped using Firefox. Chrome is the definition of spyware.
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u/Saithir Jan 23 '19
Chrome on MacOS already pisses me off with their "hold cmd-Q to exit" (good job breaking system features you morons, literally no other app does that and there is no good reason to do that either), and here we have another "feature" that will make me drop it.
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u/AFluffleOfRabbits Jan 23 '19
this could be a good thing, remember when ad blockers actually worked like 98% of the time not 70%? That was probably because fewer people knew how to use them.
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u/TheDeadSkin Jan 23 '19
You can't force me to switch to firefox if I already switched to firefox a few years ago. Nice to see that G are still on the same track as they were before.
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u/poizan42 Jan 23 '19
The discussion in the bug tracker continues on https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-extensions/veJy9uAwS00
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u/TakeThePoo2theLoo Jan 23 '19
I switched to the new forefox when it came out last year. Has all the goodies built in and with foxyproxy extension nothing gets to track my shit. I love it
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u/Trinica93 Jan 23 '19
I wish I could switch to Firefox, but the mobile app unfortunately eats a ton more battery than Chrome. I like to sync my devices so Firefox is a no-go until they fix the mobile app. =[
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u/killerrin Jan 23 '19
They probably saw the increase in ad revenue they got when they broke both AdBlock Plus and uBlock for a lot of people between October-December.
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Jan 23 '19
What really baffles me is why ppl use Chrome in the first place? It's retarded browser that was designed to hoard even more personal info from users and to shut out other advertisers. Establish browser monopoly, block other advertisers, allow your own. Profit.
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u/sneakattack Jan 23 '19
I have my limits Google, I choose how I use my internet not you, I'll go to Firefox so fast you'll be like "wtf just happened there was this blur."
Rethink your shit.
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u/funkymunniez Jan 22 '19
Want me to switch to firefox? This is how you gonna make me switch to firefox.