Google's Chrome Browser Starts Disabling uBlock Origin (pcmag.com) 205
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're a fan of uBlock Origin, don't be surprised if it stops functioning on Chrome. The Google-owned browser has started disabling the free ad blocker as part of the company's plan to phase out older "Manifest V2" extensions. On Tuesday, the developer of uBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, retweeted a screenshot from one user, showing the Chrome browser disabling the ad blocker. "These extensions are no longer supported. Chrome recommends that you remove them," the pop-up from the Chrome browser told the user. In response, Hill wrote: "The depreciation of uBO in the Chrome Web Store has started."
Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially every single google product is turning miles worse in the last few years to squeeze extra advertising revenue out of you.
Now's the time to learn our lesson.
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Insightful)
And youtube is only remotely tolerable with uBlock these days. The ads-content ratios have been going insane.
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think ads work nearly as well as advertisers believe. Yes, if you can make your ass ubiquitous you can force your product into the public consciousness and get that beautiful brand curiosity going. Or maintain brand loyalty.
Everything else? Marginal. So as advertisers pull back, platforms try to make it up on volume. Which makes their platforms less desirable which reduces ad pricing which leads to more volume.
Eventually everything ends up being a pile of crap with flyers posted on it, and economics and greed have successfully slain yet another previously useful thing.
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus if an ad becomes too obnoxious, people will associate the products with the annoyance and actively avoid them.
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus if an ad becomes too obnoxious, people will associate the products with the annoyance and actively avoid them.
This is already every ad I see TBH.
I "love" it when you go to a news site on mobile and there's a banner on top, floating video window, banner on bottom, and a larger scroll-based banner that appears and then you get a full-screen "sign up for xyz" 5 seconds in.
80% of the screen real estate is covered by ads. All you're doing is pissing off customers and training them to ignore ads. If they wonder why the click-thru rate is so low, it's because you've trained people thus. We're in some weird dystopian era rn and I'm wondering when peak-ad will hit.
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I will never use Carvana for this reason.
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus if an ad becomes too obnoxious, people will associate the products with the annoyance and actively avoid them.
There is a famous marketing book called "Ogilvy on Advertising" written by David Ogilvy [wikipedia.org].
In that book he warns that marketing firms have demonstrated empirically that the "wrong" ad can actually un-sell a product.
So yeah, that phenomenon is a thing that the advertising industry itself is aware of.
As a nerdy asperger type, I've often wondered why that doesn't apply to virtually every ad, since I find commercials to be so obnoxious that most of them leave me thinking that I will try to remember that brand so that I can NOT buy it.
But then again, I was reading an article the other day posted to Hacker News about the state of psychology, and they referenced a 2017 Heineken ad that allegedly did more good for bringing people on opposite sides of the partisan divide together than any known psychology experiment in academia ... and so I looked that up and thought to myself "now THAT is what good marketing ought to look like." So I definitely think there is a perception bias that is created by the "bad ads" that are so common. I guess if the 90/10 rule applies to everything else then it stands to reason that 90% of advertisements are garbage.
In any case, it's somewhat comforting to know that our suspicion that ads can backfire has been tested by the industry and verified.
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" Plus if an ad becomes too obnoxious, people will associate the products with the annoyance and actively avoid them. "
A lot of truth in that statement.
Was recently in the grocery store and needed some shampoo. Was looking through the ridiculously large number of choices
and noted one brand that practically interrupts every single video I see on YouTube.
Out of sheer spite for being so f***ing annoying, it was removed from the list of choices I was considering.
It might have been the most amazing sh*t I could
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Insightful)
For the most part online ads don't do anything but annoy users. Not for the companies buying them, anyway.
I worked a few years at an ad company in the day. We had the stats from our logs, our customers, and industry that showed ads actually have negative value for the ad buyers over all. For the content hosts they can be a bonanza and real business model if they have the right kind of users and don't go crazy with the excess ads. And users, I guess get free content but we had free content before ads existed on the net so maybe not. We were the content guys hosting other's ads, btw, in case that wasn't clear.
With some a/b testing, we learned the obvious: too many ads on a screen drives users away, flashy ads drive users away, auto play video and anything that makes noise will get users to send bomb threats, more than 4 reasonably small ads drives users away, forced ads before content display drives users away.... Hmmm, there's a pattern here. Too bad a decade later these dumb asses still haven't figured it out. We did 4 small not-obnoxious ads per page and made super bank without sending users fleeing.
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Interesting)
When they were static images. Now they're all JS-based and open the users up to malware.
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Ok yes, there's that. I meant don't do anything positive for the users. Sure, in addition to being annoying and a waste of time and network bits, they are a potential security and privacy problem, too, agreed. I was looking at it solely from a "what are the benefits" perspective and the answer is "none".
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On that note, I've swapped back to Firefox like 10 years ago. Chrome was "faster" when it first came out, but today I'm not sure what advantages it has, or how it's still so popular...
Re: Don't use anything from google (Score:2)
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Yet at the end of the day, the bills for the servers have to get paid.
Most people when presented with something like Youtube Premium are like "LOL - Adblockerz!", while proclaiming that ads don't work and are pointless.
At some point you have to either suffer through whatever penance there is to watch content for "free", or you have to pay for it, otherwise its not profitable to host it and the content will go away.
And remember even in a world of user generated content you still need servers to host this stu
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people tolerate ads, if they're not intrusive.
The minute advertisers started with pop-ups and animated ads that just shook to get your attention, they started digging their own graves. Instead of fixing it so that they served unobtrusive and relevant ads, they doubled down and started serving ads full of malware, ads that trigger people (A local politician has an ad that is currently playing multiple times an hour that immediately starts off with a woman talking about being sexually assaulted, my wife physically cringes every time it comes on, and yet it keeps coming on despite me reporting it through the youtube app multiple times), ads that flat out lie, and they've continued just adding more and more to the point where it completely drowns out what you're actually on the page/video looking for.
Decades of abuse by the advertising industry has people actively hating ads, and doing everything that they can to completely block them. This is the advertiser's fault.
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I tend to view it as ad effectiveness is limited to some constant value, divided among all the ads a person experiences, with some time averaging.
Go back to the days of broadcast TV.
IE show 1 30 second ad, it's effectiveness is C. Show 3 30 second ads back to back? It's C/3 per ad. Show 6 30 second ads? It's now not even C/6, as they've gone to the bathroom or kitchen.
Try to show 12 at a time? Now they're recording and fast forwarding through them, or utilizing more advanced skipping methods.
As you men
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> I don't think ads work nearly as well as advertisers
> believe.
Well... if Tesla and Costco ever team up in their hatred of me for buying a polishing cloth that can buff out scratches in my car's paint job, they send some thugs out to rough me up, which lands me in either a St. Judes or Shriners hospital, and I take my revenge by using an e-stim abs "workout" belt to become "beastly" (during my sleep, without actually working out), and go kick their asses with my new "tactical" walking stick...
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welcome to our corporatocracy, this is the inevitable result of classism in action and the decline of a once great civilization ...
Re: Don't use anything from google (Score:2)
Max Headroom world.
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I'm getting blocks of 60 second unskipable ads now on my Roku, and tons of surveys. I've taken to just putting obvious bullshit into the surveys every time.
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Rick and Morty [wikipedia.org], JuRicksic Mort [fandom.com] (S6E6):
President: At first it was fun spending all day watching whatever YouTube auto-plays after the last one auto-played, but a man can only watch so many ads for Grammarly.
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a man can only watch so many ads for Grammarly.
It is stupid for advertisers to just play the same ad over and over and over. That also annoys customers who will avoid the product.
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Especvially if the video is longer than 15 minutes. Then it's a "long video" and the ad breaks double from 30 seconds to 60 seconds.
The odd thing I find is that ads that are skippable almost never advertise what they are in those first few seconds - you've got their attention for a few seconds, they're going to skip your ad, why not make your pitch in the 5 seconds you have - name the title of your s
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I am in the process of switching over to Firefox, but I'm not writing off Chrome just yet.
There is uBlock Lite that still works with Chrome. I've been testing it because the full-fat uBlock is a battery killer in Firefox for Android. Firefox implements the pattern matching in Javascript internally, where as Chrome uses C++ and is much more efficient.
uBlock Lite blocks about 80% as much as uBlock. Most of the important stuff is removed. It's adequate, if not ideal.
So if Chrome for Android gets add-on support
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ublock lite only blocks content once it's been downloaded.
Which means you're sending HTTP requests to every tracker under the sun. And you're downloading every giant-ass video ad that you might successfully hide.
This isn't 2005 anymore, and we're not all paying out the nose for bandwidth, but I know my mobile provider still caps my download and I'd prefer not to waste it on the latest Proctor and Gamble ad-blast.
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Informative)
That's not correct, uBlock Lite does block things before they are downloaded.
Manifest V3 introduces a new network filtering API that allows add-ons to set up a large number of filtering rules that are then processed internally by Chrome when any network resource is about to be fetched.
There are some major limitations. It can only update filter lists when the add-on updates, and the number of filters is limited. The developer selects the most effective rules, you can only enable or disable general categories. No element picker and none of the advanced filtering features. It also can't do as extensive editing to BOM.
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Before its fetched, or after its fetched and before its displayed?
Re:Don't use anything from google (Score:5, Insightful)
I am in the process of switching over to Firefox, but I'm not writing off Chrome just yet.
"In the process"? Just install it, export your Chrome bookmarks and be done with it.
Despite all the trolling against firefox that usually takes place here, firefox has always been my main browser since ever, even when it was named Netscape.
OTOH, just like you'll soon be doing, I use multiple browsers so yes, I have Chrome installed but I use it only for silly sites which don't correctly work with anything else and for web applications testing purposes.
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I had to test Firefox for Android, and determine that battery life is acceptable with uBlock Lite. Then I had to test various sites I use, get things like auto-fill data moved over.
Some sites don't work so I need to keep Chrome around. I'm in no rush, I'll see how things develop. uBlock still works with a registry entry until next year.
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On Linux I do my browsing on Firefox and have not seen any problems.
Yet, the company uses Outlook, Teams, Office365 and their ilk, they work fine in Chromium.
The bottom line is; you don't need Chrome.
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I am in the process of switching over to Firefox, but I'm not writing off Chrome just yet.
I use uBlock Origin in FireFox, and videos have been blocked by YouTube in FireFox for months. I have to use Chrome to watch 80% of videos.
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So far I have seen no problems caused by uBO.
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I find YouTube is okay with uBlock in Firefox. At least in normal windows, in private browsing they don't work for some reason.
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How long has it been since you updated firefox and uBlock Origin? I have only seen 1 ad on youtube in several years of Firefox/uBlock/NoScript, and a commercial hardware firewall that blocks about 300 domains, but then I don't log into youtube in Firefox. If I feel the need to comment on a video, I'll paste the URL into chrome, pause the ad, and scroll down to make my comment.
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It's not just Google. It's just about everything online (ie. not the hardware or software, but the services and behaviors.) these last several years.
Pretty much everything about it, except for the technology itself... from the C-suites to the methodologies to the policies to the laws and regulations to the pricing models to the VC environment to the activism to the trolling to the ads and blockers to the vibrancy of SOMA and environs to just about everything else... needs to be rolled back to a known-good
Firefox Still Supports Manifest V2 (Score:5, Informative)
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For now.
All switching to Firefox will get you is kicking the can down the road. Once it stops having upstream support the writing is on the wall.
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Nah, I'll just keep killing the ads through using AdGuard Home at the network level. Good luck deprecating that in your browser without also breaking private DNS.
Re: Firefox Still Supports Manifest V2 (Score:2)
The web sites can probably make ad detections to ensure no content for you unless you get 25 blipverts per hour.
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That's vague.
To my memory, the things they did to suck 10 years ago were all copying the UI anti-patterns that chrome used.
And no, those haven't gone away.
Re: Firefox Still Supports Manifest V2 (Score:5, Informative)
If you gave up 10 years ago the answer is yes. Firefox went through a very core re-write in 2017 which turned it back into a functional and competitive browser, no longer painfully slow, no longer crashing when you look at it funny.
If you're annoyed about some nebulous issue on the interface, well I'm sure that still sucks.
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Rust isn't my favorite language, but using it to prove correctness without losing speed is something cool.
Re: Firefox Still Supports Manifest V2 (Score:3)
I'd like to rewrite in Fortran.
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I haven't had that problem, but w/ uBlock Origin and NoScript, Firefox hangs after 2-3 weeks, even with only three windows and 5 tabs open. If I really want to kill it, I'll open a dozen youtube tabs. After the 6-7th, they'll completely fail to load showing only the rotating ring in off-white on white in the center of the window. At that point, I have to save any important URLs, and force-close firefox because it will be unusable in minutes.
No problem (Score:5, Informative)
uBlock Origin works just fine in Pale Moon for me.
Re:No problem (Score:5, Informative)
uBlock Origin works just fine in Pale Moon for me.
uBlock Origin works well on Palemoon, but not for YouTube. On YouTube I get a popup message saying that adblocking violates Youtube's terms of service. I don't get that with Firefox or Brave.
I really like Palemoon and have used it as my main wen browser for a couple of years now. Unfortunately, the developer of Palemoon doesn't like "web extensions", so Palemoon requires its own special version of uBlock Origin that isn't updated as often
There really is no reason to use Chrome any more. There are other chromium-based browsers hat work just as well and don't have Google's anti-user bullshit built in.
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Sadly, Pale Moon disables NoScript, which means I have to use a different browser.
Really? When I was last using Pale Moon it was still possible to install and use NoScript. Moonchild really hated it and got in a snit when people questioned his judgment about it, but I installed and enabled it anyway. I'm kinda surprised that it's no longer possible to use it.
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Long Live Firefox! (Score:5, Insightful)
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From the very first time I saw Google attempting to sneak-install Chrome when visiting google.com, I was turned off and have since bristled at their strong-arm, aggressive tactics to get people to use their browser.
I never left Firefox and I am glad that they are still around to offer an alternative to Chromium and Webkit.
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That was only after every visit to google.com generated a popup prompting you to install Chrome...and you didn't.
Other browsers (Score:5, Informative)
Time for FF, Brave or DDG.
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I use Brave but it is a derivative of Chrome, and I am wondering if Brave can continue to support uBlock Origin.
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LibreWolf isn't bad either (Firefox fork with no Pocket and better privacy defaults). Mullvad Browser is apparently decent but I have not tried it. I use their VPN though.
Lifelong firefox user (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lifelong firefox user (Score:5, Insightful)
Ditto. FF has been solid for me as my daily driver for years. Remember when Chrome first launched and everyone loved it because it was "so fast"? The days of the noticeable performance boost are long gone. Yes, there's a handful of sites which don't work well with it (EX: QNAP, vCenter, etc) but that's not exactly a deal breaker.
For most users, FF will work just fine but they're too traumatized by some second hand story about someone's brothers aunts roommates cousin that couldn't get a YouTube video to work during a full moon.
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I believe Firefox not working sometimes is mainly because of its lack of popularity, developers simply don't test and there are some differences, if people start using it those issues would go away. But it is pretty good and most sites work and if it doesn't turning off enhanced tracking protection usually fixes it.
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Ditto the Ditto, been using FireFox for nearly two decades now. NoScript and uBlock Origin are essentials in my opinion.
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I am a longtime Firefox user, but time is running out, I fear. About a month ago I was no longer able to log into PG&E, my natural gas and electricity provider. No errors, but the sign-in page would not load on Linux or Windows. Last week, that changed. They print link to a page that says that only Chrome, Edge and Safari would be allowed to login to their web pages. The claimed that no other browser exceeds 5% of users and, rather than spend resources supporting other browsers, they were blocking all
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Odd about Chase Bank.. I am on Linux and able to logon to Chase just fine with FF.
How fortunate for me that I don't use Chrome, then (Score:5, Insightful)
How fortunate for me that I don't use Chrome, then.
Oh, you say many do, and thus I shoudl be concerned?
Why, yes -- I am concerned -- but about the direction the internet is taking, while being "steered" by Google for 20 years now.
The folly of people never ceases to amaze me. You lie with dogs, wake up with fleas. Put another way, you use a browser from the world's biggest advertiser and data rapist, you're expected to just bend over and take it for your Tech Bro Overlords.
Ditch Google, as hard as you can, on as many fronts as you can. Deny them every penny you can.
Re:How fortunate for me that I don't use Chrome, t (Score:5, Interesting)
Ditch Google, as hard as you can, on as many fronts as you can. Deny them every penny you can.
Done. I run LineageOS with no Google apps - not even MicroG. For apps, I sideload, download from web sites, or use F-Droid. NewPipe for YouTube, Protonmail and K9 Mail for email, Firefox and DDG for browsing.
On my laptop I run two versions of Firefox, with uBlock installed. I use Chromium VERY rarely when FF doesn't get it done for some reason. I use DDG for search, and only go to Google when I don't find what I need elsewhere. I've never signed in to YouTube. I download vids from YT by using yt-dlp.
Google started playing games by separating video and audio tracks. I couldn't get PhantomJS working to fix that, so now I download the video and the audio separately and merge them with MKVToolnixGUI. As a bonus, I can normalize the audio before merging.
If I ever find that I can no longer block ads on YouTube, and can't download videos, then I won't go there anymore. If I can't use LineageOS or GrapheneOS on my phone, I'll ditch Android-based phones and slide down to Apple's walled gutter. If that's not an option, I'll get a feature-phone. Fuck Google - they need to die. I hope the DOJ breaks them into bite-sized pieces and scatters them to the winds.
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A classic. Also, "He who fly in airplane upside down have crack up"
Why? (Score:3)
Back to Firefox...
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the rationale from Google? That they don't like it when we have nice things? Back to Firefox...
Google is an ad company first, so I would assume the rationale is, "This just ever so slightly slows our Mississippi river size profit margin. Block it."
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Because they are an advertising company, first and foremost.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
It's right in the summary? Google announced a transition from Manifest V2 to V3 in 2019 and are now enforcing the transition. They say it's mainly security issues, I will leave that up to the reader to determine but it's not like browser pluging haven't been big security holes since they existed so I would say there is some validity to it.
Raymond Hill explains it right in his FAQ of the capabilities UBO loses from the transition to UBOL which is already V3 compatible:
Filtering capabilities which can't be ported to MV3 [github.com]
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I remember when I used to admire Google. Now they're just another profit-hungry corporate machine.
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You're asking why McDonalds opposes treating cattle like humans.
Stop asking questions and get back to looking at ads.
Adblockers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh, I've come to realize that I don't need adblockers anymore. Malwarebytes browser plugin does everything I need.
Re: Adblockers... (Score:4)
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Eh, I've come to realize that I don't need adblockers anymore. Malwarebytes browser plugin does everything I need.
For now. Malwarebytes is also a Manifest V2 plugin which will need to be significantly gimped for Manifest V3.
Time to disable Chrome then (Score:5, Insightful)
Whelp, the time has arrived to completely uninstall Chrome, then.
Re:Time to disable Chrome then (Score:4, Insightful)
The best time was 15 years ago.... But the second best time is now :)
New adbvlockers, same as the old adblockers (Score:2)
Origin uBlock Lite works just fine. Put the pitchforks down.
Re:New adbvlockers, same as the old adblockers (Score:5, Informative)
Switch to Brave (Score:2)
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I was switching off Firefox, and reluctantly heading to Chrome when the announcement sparked a discussion that got me on Brave.
No regrets so far.
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Here [wikipedia.org] are some regrets for you:
Add to that the ads on the dashboard and the cryptocurrency bullshit [brave.com] and it paints a picture of pretty unscrupulous owners. Enjoy your honeymoon—it seems predestined for enshittification.
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Sure, but since Brave is using Chromium (which is an open-source project maintained by Google), how long before they are forced to fork the code base in order to continue on with V2?
I think a big reason that other projects use Chromium is for the cross-compatibility with other Chromium-based browsers. You can write one extension and use it in many different browsers.
As time goes forward, the fork that Brave would be using will become more and more divergent from the official Chromium project and new plugins
Interpret Google as damage and route around it (Score:2)
Network Wide Adblocking (Score:2)
https://pi-hole.net/ [pi-hole.net]
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It has had limited effectiveness for me. Many apps and devices have hard-coded DNS servers and do the DNS-over-SSL queries that are either unblockable or break when you try.
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If it was just me, pi-hole and noscript all the way. I am fine doing the extra work to troubleshoot problems and create exceptions.
My wife, on the old hand, is not so tolerant.
With the pi-hole in place, I would get calls like "why doesn't Paramount+ save viewing progress?" and "Why do web pages look weird / not work?" and "I am trying to play a game on my tablet but the game just goes blank for periods of time"
It got to be too much to try to figure out from the logs which domains were serving what purpose s
Firefox is not the solution (Score:2)
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I can't imagine that Google strong-arming an open-source product like Firefox is going to be very effective.
Even if they somehow convince Mozilla to throw away their people and privacy focused manifesto and side with the advertisers (which I could actually see happen with the presentation of a large enough "donation" check), someone would just create yet another fork of the browser with those modifications removed.
Advertising Company (Score:2)
Firefox (Score:2)
Long live Mozilla (Score:2)
Phoenix!
Avoid Chrome (Score:2)
Chrome recommends that ...
Everyone is talking about Firefox: While I love the Mozilla philosophy, their own browser is a little under-performing by today's standards. I think Zen [zen-browser.app] or Librewolf [librewolf.net] or Waterfox [waterfox.net] provide a
Brave (Score:2)
Pale Moon is the life boat. (Score:2)
You mean people want to protect themselves? (Score:2)
Google: "You mean people want to protect themselves from malware-laced ads and privacy intrusions and improve their browsing experience? That's crazy talk."
They up-armor Humvees because they travel through dangerous terrain. The browser is like a Humvee, and the Web is dangerous, full of malware and privacy invasions. They want to down-armor users for their own profit - it's nothing new, but users might frown upon such a thing.
We'll see if this drives an exodus from Chrome.
This feels like an unforced error
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Yes, that's ll true. Ublock Origin has hacked and root kitted me dozens of ti... oh wait, no, it hasn't.
If this was really about security they could vet developers and have a program to sign up as partners. I'm sure they could even find a way to profit from that.
Google is an ad company that makes most of their money from browser ads. They made a decent browser during a time there wasn't one. They owned the ads and the delivery mechanism. Now they're just pulling the trigger on filtering their revenue s
Re:Whining gits (Score:5, Informative)
False, they have gotten there. Unfortunately under manifest V3 the functionality is somewhat hindered and as such they actually released their fully compliant manifest V3 plugin under a different name: uBlock Origin Lite allowing users to continue to use the objectively better version as long as they can.
uBlock Origin isn't alone in this, Malwarebytes Browser Guard have the same issue. Literally everyone producing content blocking plugins have come out and pointed out severe technical limitations that manifest v3 impose on them. Yeah v3 also includes security benefits, but don't pretend that is the only thing that it does. There are legit restrictions in place on what a plugin can do.
Not according to Raymond Hill. (Score:5, Informative)