PSA: How to keep using adblockers on Chrome and Chromium
133 points by coolelectronics 11 months ago | 92 comments- martin293 11 months agoThis solution will work for exactly a year. That's how long google gives enterprises to migrate to manifest v3.
Source: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
- plorkyeran 11 months agoI 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.
- plorkyeran 11 months ago
- justahuman74 11 months agoThis seems like it's too hard to tell friends/family.
Is the go-to now just 'install firefox'?
- coolelectronics 11 months agoi would always tell them to install firefox. this is mostly for developers and tech oriented people who need to keep chrome around
- stavros 11 months agoIf I need to keep Chrome around for development, I'm not using extensions on it, and I'm only visiting the sites I'm developing.
- ASalazarMX 11 months agoIf you use things like Apple Business Manager and you're not using a Mac, it only works on Chrome.
- ASalazarMX 11 months ago
- stavros 11 months ago
- jsheard 11 months agoIf 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.
- londons_explore 11 months agoEven when it's stripped out entirely, it will be easy to add back in. The changes (that adblockers care about) are just a few if statements changing the conditions under which synchronous inspection of web requests are allowed. Manifest V3 still allows them. But only in limited circumstances which are unsuitable for ad blocking.
- davesmylie 11 months agoThere will be a switch available ... but only for a period of time before the functionality is completely removed
- metadat 11 months agoAnd apparently, as per this post, only available to folks who are savvy with the command-line.
- metadat 11 months ago
- londons_explore 11 months ago
- shrimp_emoji 11 months agoI 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.
- VancouverMan 11 months agoAfter 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.
- add-sub-mul-div 11 months agoIf this is about trust, Google is by far less trustworthy. Firefox is a flawed option vs. a shitty non-starter option.
- pennybanks 11 months agowhy do you think that? mozilla is not without its controversies and google basically owns them
- pennybanks 11 months ago
- metadat 11 months agoWere the poor decisions made by Mozilla engineers or by Mozilla Corporate Executives? Mozilla has never paid engineers particularly well; in the past engineers joined mostly out of a duty bound to philosophical alignment.
- add-sub-mul-div 11 months ago
- hgs3 11 months ago> 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.
- stavros 11 months agoI don't understand why people want to teach others how to cope with an abusive relationship, instead of telling them to leave.
- stavros 11 months ago
- causality0 11 months agoYou can't just send them a .reg file and tell them to double click on it and hit ok?
- zxxh 11 months ago[flagged]
- fifteen1506 11 months agoJust tell them to use Edge. It's the worse you can do to Google.
- paxys 11 months agoIt's also the worst you can do to your friends and family.
- irrational 11 months agoWhy edge instead of Firefox?
- pcf 11 months agoOn macOS it actually uses less resources, and you can use Chrome extensions.
- rwaksmunski 11 months agoSearch defaults to Bing?
- pcf 11 months ago
- paxys 11 months ago
- coolelectronics 11 months ago
- gravescale 11 months agoFinally some news that makes me think the Firefox has a glimmer of hope left.
- quickthrowman 11 months agoSame here, I’ll be switching to Firefox today after hearing this news.
- gravescale 11 months agoWhat has been holding you back so far? It seems strange to me that so many normally quite pro-privacy, pro-FOSS, Google-sceptical people are still using Chrome to this point.
- quickthrowman 11 months agoI would like to have privacy but understand that’s nearly impossible in reality. I was using Chrome mostly due to inertia, but not being able to block ads is unacceptable to me. I do most of my browsing on iOS Safari these days, but use Chrome on my work computer.
I’m unfortunately handcuffed to google due to gmail, switching seems like a monumental task and google is going to get my personal data whether I have gmail or not from AdWords, etc.
- quickthrowman 11 months ago
- gravescale 11 months ago
- chx 11 months agoEvery 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.
- wruza 11 months agoAlmost every adblock user will move to firefox. They didn’t install it out of boredom, cause that’s non-trivial.
I mean it is trivial, but the world fights over defaults now and there are people who only use defaults and complain when they change.
So yeah, they will move. Download an app, import userdata, reinstall extensions and blog about this hacker-news-level journey.
- chx 11 months ago> reinstall extensions
I've done this journey. This step is exceptionally difficult, sometimes impossible. https://github.com/exile-center/better-trading
And it's even more difficult because I can't find a link to the original store page from an addon within firefox so I can't easily share my findings. https://i.imgur.com/zh2M9YA.png I do not see a link. Perhaps fixing that should have been a priority for Mozilla instead of a bullshit alt generator but it's AI so of course it's got priority. Instead of doing everything in their power to grow their market share ... spreadfirefox reboot when.
- chx 11 months ago
- wruza 11 months ago
- quickthrowman 11 months ago
- nazgulsenpai 11 months agoFirst recommendation would be a pihole running anywhere you can run it, but if you don't want to or can't do that, you can use Steven Black's ad list to create a hosts file to DNS sink ad/bad networks locally:
- jsheard 11 months agoIsn'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.
- cj 11 months agoSpecifically, the ability to block specific URL patterns in addition to just hostnames.
DNS blocking gets you 90% of the way there, though. (And the only way to block your smart fridge from phoning home)
- nazgulsenpai 11 months agoYes, I didn't intend to suggest it a replacement for a strong ad block but if v3 neuters it for those who don't want to or can't swap browsers.
Also a big benefit of DNS level blocking is it can block telemetry other unwanted network traffic (unless connection by IP or some other wizardry), for instance how often my TV attempts to phone home.
- cj 11 months ago
- stavros 11 months agoFirst recommendation would be Firefox.
- jsheard 11 months ago
- krackers 11 months ago>key was added and will presumably stay forever
Nope, it will be removed after 1 year. There is a chance they delay it depending on how much the enterprises complain, but so long as all their big clients are migrated I doubt they care about the long-tail.
- londons_explore 11 months agoThere'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...
- 11 months ago
- londons_explore 11 months ago
- sigma5 11 months agoI switched to firefox one year ago. Works fine!
- jay_kyburz 11 months agoQuestion: Is it possible to run ad blocking at the OS level rather than in the browser? Requests to ad servers just never leave your PC? traffic from ad servers just never arrives at the browser?
- II2II 11 months agoA 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.
- Krssst 11 months agoOn 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.
- stvltvs 11 months agoYou can use the hosts file to block ads.
- efilife 11 months agoLook up technitium dns
- II2II 11 months ago
- ipsum2 11 months agoToo bad the HN Flamewar detector removed this post from the homepage. The content is interesting, the comments are pointless bickering over browsers
- drcongo 11 months agoSerious question, why is anyone still using Chrome? It's so user-hostile and basically spyware at this point, it boggles my mind that anyone would intentionally install spyware on their computer.
- unpopularopp 11 months agoHow do you make sites that are only whitelist certain browsers to work under Firefox? Is there an app, extensions etc anything?
For some handful of sites I have to keep a Chrome install around
- JoshTriplett 11 months ago1) 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).
- actinium226 11 months agoI 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!
- page_fault 11 months ago
- martin293 11 months agoSometimes this might not work, in that case try a different extension or different user agent strings. I had to go through a few before I found one that worked.
- martin293 11 months ago
- JoshTriplett 11 months ago
- freehorse 11 months agoHow many people are gonna do all this to get an adblocker working? How long is this workaround gonna be allowed by google?
What excuses remain for sustaining the chromium monopoly that allows this shitshow, and for using chrome and chromium derived browsers instead of firefox?
- cranberryturkey 11 months agofirefox is still the best browser.
- coolelectronics 11 months agoi 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
- martin293 11 months agoWhich features do you mean?
- wruza 11 months agoI don’t know whether FF lacks these features, but I’m using:
- webpage splits
- search by image
- go to non-<a> url in bg tab
- open in new tab in a virtual sub group rather than just to the right or at the end
- tabs retain width on close until mouse goes away (helps with closing series of tabs)
- bookmarks open in new tab by default
- last tab doesn’t close the browser
- gestures and toolbar customization
That’s in Vivaldi, I probably forgot a bunch of features that feel natural but may have no FF counterpart. Tbh, looking at FF settings, there’s basically none. You can’t miss features that you never had, I guess.
- wruza 11 months ago
- ClassyJacket 11 months agoWhat features?
- stavros 11 months agoLike what?
- martin293 11 months ago
- coolelectronics 11 months ago
- jiggawatts 11 months ago“I like this pot, but it just keeps getting warmer and warmer. Does anyone know where I can get some ice packs or something?”
“No, I don’t want to jump out. Stop telling me that!”
- actinium226 11 months agoOr just use Firefox.
- efangs 11 months agoeveryone should just have a pihole
- skrause 11 months agoPi-hole and other DNS-based ad blockers are a lot worse than even Manifest v3 ad blockers, so they aren't any alternative.
- skrause 11 months ago
- baxuz 11 months agoUse Adguard
- Teknomancer 11 months agoBrave.
- tumsfestival 11 months agoImagine still using Brave in plain 2024.
- tumsfestival 11 months ago
- hehdhdjehehegwv 11 months agoJust stop using Chrome FFS.
- gddgb 11 months ago[dead]
- 11 months ago
- noman-land 11 months ago[flagged]
- TheGlav 11 months agoIt's IE all over again. Sometimes you can't.
- viraptor 11 months agoIf you have those one or two very specific websites that just cannot cope with Firefox, just use Chrome for them. They're likely not the ad-filled pages anyway, but rather some specific companies.
We've done this for the IE in the past, we can do it today. It really doesn't take that much time.
There's only one thing that will fix this situation long term and it's lowering chrome's market share. Don't stick with it and get continuously abused - no, it won't get better, only worse from now on.
- page_fault 11 months agoMost of those "cannot copes" can be fixed by changing the user agent to that of Chrome. Most sites that refuse to work in other browsers simply don't test on anything but Chrome and don't want the support burden.
- page_fault 11 months ago
- noman-land 11 months agoI can't really fathom a scenario where you can't install other browsers but you can run a command in Terminal to alter some root permissions.
- hehdhdjehehegwv 11 months agoI don’t see how that is true. There are a ton of chromium based browsers, many with privacy enhancements baked in, and Safari is well supported (iOS monopoly ensures that).
I’ll give you Firefox not working well due to Mozilla shitting the bed under Baker who I consider a vandal and a charlatan.
As somebody who lives through IE6 the trend of a dominant browser shitting on users is the same - but so many more options to switch now.
- 11 months ago
- MattGaiser 11 months agoIE was technically garbage and people eagerly wanted to get away from it as it broke sites.
Sites are now mostly built and tested on Chrome. Firefox breaks sites.
- yoyohello13 11 months agoI've been using Firefox exclusively for years. I have no idea what these people who say it breaks sites are talking about. If you absolutely need to use chrome for something just keep chromium around for that specific site.
- Y_Y 11 months agoFirefox is a decent browser. Some sites are coded like shit and then they futz around until it works in whatever Chrome your cousin used for development.
- viraptor 11 months agoThere's some very specific sites that are broken in non-chrome browsers. Writing this message took you more time than you'd spend starting chrome specifically for them for the next few months.
- wizzwizz4 11 months agoI see you managed to avoid encountering the Great ActiveX Catastrophe. Microsoft successfully managed to lock thousands of services behind proprietary extensions that only IE supported.
Also, IE wasn't technically garbage. There were a few, specific things wrong with it. Its main issue was that it implemented web features idiosyncratically, and Microsoft didn't document it, so you had to learn all of IE's "quirks" through trial and error: but apart from being undocumented, few of IE's idiosyncrasies were actually bugs. Its box model, for example, was arguably superior to the official W3C recommendation.
- ChrisGranger 11 months agoFor sites that break when using Firefox, you can report them here: https://webcompat.com/
- loloquwowndueo 11 months agoFirefox doesn’t break sites.
- yreg 11 months agoAll browsers break sites. In the past few months we've had our stuff broken due to bugs in Safari, Chromium and even Firefox.
But the situation is nothing like when IE was alive. Webdevelopment is much more pleasant now.
If I had to pick a black sheep now, I would say it's Safari, simply because the updates are tied in with OS updates. That's a shame.
- freehorse 11 months agoRemoving ad blocking is what breaks the internet for me. Firefox is working 99.9% fine except 0.1% of site which I usually do not miss or in the worst case open in another browser. This is an insignificant nuance compared to the constant distraction of not using an ad blocker.
- noman-land 11 months agoThis is FUD. Firefox doesn't break any sites. There is functionally no difference between sites rendered in Firefox and sites rendered in Chrome.
- yoyohello13 11 months ago
- viraptor 11 months ago
- 11 months ago
- TheGlav 11 months ago
- scotthn 11 months ago[flagged]
- actinium226 11 months agoBut Brave is based on Chrome, so won't it be affected the same way? And same for Arc?
- johtso 11 months agoArc are planning on building a built in adblocker https://x.com/joshm/status/1728926780600508716
- rglullis 11 months agoNo. Brave will keep supporting Manifest v2 extensions.
- johtso 11 months ago
- actinium226 11 months ago
- nunez 11 months agoOr maybe stop supporting Google's quest to monopolize the web and use (and test against!) LITERALLY ANY OTHER BROWSER
