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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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I think some people overestimate how many will migrate to Firefox in the near future over this.
As fun as it is to imagine an Adpocalypse shocking the masses and pushing them to try out alternatives to big tech, it's also way too optimistic, I feel.
Yeah, same with people here declaring the death of reddit, or Twitter, or any of these massive, mainstream services. People in bubbles (and Lemmy is definitely a bubble) always seem to underestimate how little everyone else cares or even knows about the things that are important to them. The service needs to be extremely bad in a user experience way, not an ethical way, for an extended period of time and there needs to be a big social movement where lots of people migrate to a direct and equivalent competitor within a short space of time. Most people will not do it on their own, they will wait until they see their peers doing it and only then can a migration start to snowball.
"Netflix will die when they ban account sharing!!" - Reddit/Lemmy/Techtubers
Netflix actually went on to have a massive jump in revenue, because most normal people can't be arsed to set up a Plex/Emby/Jellyfin server and buy a shitload of storage.
The uBlock Origin chrome extension ~~has~~ had 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.
Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.
Yeah, I thought about mentioning that. But the comparison goes both ways. Less than 1% of Chrome users switching to Firefox could still mean an increase in Firefox users of over 10%, if I remember my numbers correctly. That'd be a sweet boost for most products.
Ya, it’d still be huge for Firefox, but what I’m really getting at is that even with this change, Chrome is going nowhere. They’re the big fish, they can afford to make these kinds of changes, because the people who care are a very small minority.
To be fair, nerds will tell their tech-illiterate friends about this change and probably influence them enough to consider it. Especially when it's something as easy as downloading an application.
It's much easier to switch a browser then it is to stop using Google, Facebook, etc.
Depends on their methodology. Sure, a huge proportion of those are users who haven't heard of uBO, but we're forgetting a lot of caveats:
All of these skew the numbers towards Chrome. Some Chrome users use a different adblocker which lowers the uBO statistic.
I’ve been on Firefox since manifest v3 was announced. Firefox has its own shortcomings but no dealbreakers.
What are some shortcomings in your view?
I don't like the lack of customisability. I've been using Vivaldi for a long time now and nothing comes close to how customisable and feature-packed it is. Everything can be set up and tweaked exactly how I want. My version of Vivaldi would look, feel, and act entirely different to someone else's, because it does what I want, not the other way around.
Unfortunately, it's Chromium-based. But the developers have been working on its native ad blocker in case extensions are impacted. They're quite a brilliant bunch, so I'm hoping it all goes smooth. I really don't want to have to go back to Firefox if I can help it. I can't stand UX for the masses and these guys get it.
There's also other chromium browsers with built-in ad-blocking that still work AFAIK. If all extensions and forked brower's ad-blockers stopped working, I think there would probably be a surge in firefox usage (even if there's not that much change in chromium usage).
Yeah I use Vivaldi as my daily driver and love it. There’s built in ad blocking but it’s not as good as the extension. If the extension stops working there I’ll switch to Firefox in a heartbeat though
As a supporter of Firefox and FOSS, the closed-source, Chromium-based Vivaldi is my guilty pleasure. It has the best UI experience I've found on a browser, and the company behind it doesn't seem to be very evil.
Leaving Vivaldi was a sad moment for me. That UI, that sidebar, the settings, those features...! Goodness. I'm an avid enjoyer of bells and whistles, and Vivaldi's got all of them and then some. I miss that a bit.
The folks working on it seem great, check their blog for their decision track record 1 2 3. Did you know they also host a mastodon instance? Literally my only issue with it is the engine, and that just so unluckily happens to be a deal breaker.
Yeah the founders are ex-Opera devs who left after the company was acquired by Qihoo 360, and the power user UI features are leagues ahead of other browsers I’ve tried. I wish Firefox developer edition would embrace of a philosophy of a more customizable UI centered around power users
Is there any other browser that does a right-side vertical tab bar with compact tabs?
There's an extension for Firefox to do it, but it's a bit clunkier than Vivaldi's - definitely something I'd only switch to if I really had to... but every other browser I've seen only offers left-side vertical tabs at best, which is terrible if you want 3 monitors in a left-to-right layout with your browser on the left.
I think what you want is in Firefox nightly right now: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/08/07/firefox-sidebar-and-vertical-tabs-try-them-out-in-nightly-firefox-labs-131/
That expands and compacts based on the sidebar state and can be flipped to the right side of the window in the 'customise sidebar' settings.
Vivaldi is cool. I installed it (for those who wanted a chromium browser) and FF on all the work computers where I work. Eventually uninstalled it because people started playing Vivaldia. Disabled Edge, so now they are FF only.
Hopefully it will give Firefox a bit of a boost anyway. Firefox needs a boost.
If large numbers of people were going to switch browsers over an ad-blocking extension, the whole advertising industry would be significantly less successful than it is.
Not to mention all the people who don't even have an adblocker and for some reason don't seem to care that their web browsing is infested with ads.
A lot of people don't even know it's an option, or have grown to believe that's just how the web is. When was the last time you saw adblockers in mainstream media or news?
This is why I think it's so important to keep raising awareness. If you have people in your life who you believe would be better off using uBlock, consider bringing it up when you have the opportunity.
You're not wrong about the high switching cost.
Switching from Chrome to Vivaldi (because of Chrome's whole FLoC thing) to Brave (because I didn't like Vivaldi's layout) to Firefox (because of Brave's whole thing) was a pain.
And I don't mean as a whole. Taking the time each time to change from one browser to another was always a pain. Transferring bookmarks and passwords was easy (Chrome and Firefox are at least compatible in that regard), but transferring extension settings was a whole different beast.
Some extensions had cloud sync support. Others had local export support. Some didn't have either kind, and I'd have to manually copy the settings from one browser over to the other. And that's not even getting into finding replacements for the Chrome-exclusive extensions (of which there were only a few, thankfully).
Ha.
I'm sorry to hear that, been there (Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Firefox in my case). Hopefully we can stick around for a while.
My friends will stick to chrome, I switched to Firefox months ago. You're right
And then there are Safari users who are watching from the sidelines.
1 year ago I had basically free Spotify Premium because Safari was unable to play ads. That's a kind of ad blocking.
And you ran zero ad blockers in Safari and on your network?
No ad blocker. This bug started to break song playback on Safari (according to Spotify's forums, I faced no such problem) and then it was fixed so I got ads.
I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you're underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the "family tech guy". the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone's new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.
setting up granny's laptop? I'll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most "1000th visitor!" banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that's all she knows the internet as. she doesn't know of care about the browser options so it's up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I'm not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.
For what it's worth, I hope you're right.
I think probably the single most important thing that nobody is saying is that Google have ALL the numbers on this decision and they are not stupid, so it would be silly to assume this will work against their interests. Not only do they know how many people use chrome, their ad network gives them insight into ALL browsers.
Do you have some source for that? IIUC, you mean that more Chrome users like Chrome than Firefox users like Firefox, right?
"Some people like things."
SOURCE?!
"Some firefox users like firefox" vs "many chrome users enjoy what they have" sounds to me like something that could have a source. Many sound to me more than some, so this is a comparison, which can be given a better foundation by supplying some numbers.
I thought that might've been the source of your misunderstanding. Sorry, that's just how I write sometimes, no deeper meaning intended. As far as I know there's no public data on what percentage of Firefox and Chrome users like their browsers' features.
No. I simply meant that there exist Chrome users who appreciate what it provides them (features, UI, etc), so for these users to leave they'd have to give up those things. That's always a hard ask.