If you’re still using Chrome it’s a you problem.
Firefox + ublock origin + SponsorBlock for youtube is great. Works on mobile too!
The other day I got to pondering whether people who work for ad serving companies have ad blockers on their work computers.
You won’t get me off adblock, as of recently i’ve come to find we get significantly more ads compared to friends and family.
My dad plays wordfeud, so i install and play a set with him…about 5 seconds in i get frustrated at the 4th ad and my dad goes: “which ads”.
My friends keep telling me i’m taking the youtube ads far too serious as they are only 10 seconds and show it to me too.
My youtube ads are 1 minute unskippable blocks before and after 1m 51s videos. I’ll get a 1min ad block halfway into a 5 minute video even though youtube themselves claim they don’t do that.
How the fuck am i so fucked when it comes to ads, my dads phone is almost completely ad free. Heck the google top suggestions that are basically paid for ads don’t even show up on his phone.
He can play those free apps (advertisement feeding software) without getting any ads and he’s adamant his phone isn’t modified.
If you use android, just use adguard private dns. It will get rid of third party apps ads. For youtube you need revanced or newpipe
It seems that many people here are not aware of how much Mozilla depends on Google, so switching to them is a small consolation. Maybe it’s time to support the development of new engines like Servo and Ladybird more. Servo even recently released an Android version (currently not very usable, but I downloaded it just to show support).
Opera browser? The one that everyone was making a stink about a few years ago? The one owned directly by a Chinese based company, and was supposedly sending telemetry to China?
I stopped using Opera the second it wasn’t Norwegian. I use Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile and Vivaldi as the “clean” browser when something k. Waterfox/Librewolf fucks up an important webpage I have to use
The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn’t mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.
I’ve been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn’t any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.
While the concern remains valid, I’m also asking myself whether it’s that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I’m neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.
So in the end it’s on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.
I would rather give my data to Firefox than a company who’s entire business model is selling user data. That being said, you could use librewolf which removes telemetry. I use both Firefox and librewolf
I’m using Fennec which also removes telemetry, but many standard users are not comfortable installing apps that aren’t on Google play.
The amount of people who only feel comfortable downloading on Google Play and also care about privacy I feel like is very small but I don’t know.
Some people would rather give their data to opera then firefox 🤦♂️
Mozilla seems to be transitioning to becoming an advertising company so I wouldn’t want them to have my data either.
People are still using it thanks to them forcing (ig sponsors from yt videos) and appealing to young generations with the opera gx browser and Twitter account mostly.
With the regular browser I assume they got it by accident while downloading adware(this might have happened to gx).
A better title: Opera explains shit on how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support. Will talk to developers so see if anyone has a good ideas.
They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there’s that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they’d have to maintain independently.
I guess the current situation could be better if Opera and Brave coordinated among themselves a shared codebase for a patch that would allow both of them to keep v2 working. The thing is that Brave most likely doesn’t actually care, they’ve a built in adblocker so if v2 goes away then their marketshare will increase. Opera can’t do it alone because, well it is the Opera Chinese owned company after all.
I was really hopping that Microsoft would take on this, think about it, from a strategic PoV if Edge kept v2 and advertised it they could just snatch a big chunk of users from Google.
This is supposition but…
I imagine that disabling V2 is as simple as setting a flag during compile, at present. Obviously as the rest of the code base progresses it will become less simple to enable V2 support.
From a marketing perspective, the smart play is to say that you’ll continue supporting uBlock Origin and keep saying that for at least the next month or so, in order to gather up some refugees from chrome. Thereafter tell every one that your built in blocker is better than uBlock Origin anyway, and then drop support for V2.
Opera is not a trustworthy browser and there has been no point in it existing since they stopped using presto.
Impostors, in other words.
~Why is that? Any extra resources on it not being trustworthy?~
Nevermind, I just read other comments below :)
serious question: how does opera (the company) make money?
originally? a paid product. now? crypto!
Partner integrations from what I know - search engines, bookmarks and so on.
Partner integration? You mean a partner of them pays them to be allowed to look at your browsing habits?
Did opera leave Norway? Is this stuff worse after that, if they left? What country did they go to?
Zhou Yahui (Chinese: 周亚辉; born February 1977) is a Chinese billionaire and entrepreneur. In 2008, he founded Kunlun Tech Co Ltd (formerly Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd) one of the largest web game developers in China, where he was the chairman and CEO until 2020. Yahui Zhou currently serves as chairman and co-CEO of Opera. His estimated net worth is US$2.2 billion.
A reminder that Opera is owned by a Chinese public company. I wouldn’t trust the browser for privacy reasons.
Not even just that, they also have a history with making loan apps with predatory rates. I wouldnt trust them even if I was a member of CCP.
s/owned by a Chinese public company/proprietary/Although another problem is that it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Yet another chromium browser with built-in proxies and data collection 🤷
Just use Firefox and its variants for more privacy. Done. Chromium is a dead road. Even with ungoogled chromium , brave , etc you have to trust the maintainers and their compiled version.
I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome’s sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn’t make a single dent in Chromium’s dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.
Nah it would make a big dent for sure.
Firefox has ~180 million users
Amount of users using adblockers is ~900 million.
It would massively change the market.
Numbers according to mozilla and statista
There are at least 3.45 billion Chrome users (not chromium, chrome).
Out of those ~900 million adblocker users, how many are using those adblockers that let paid advertiser’s to get on a whitelist? How many are willing to make an effort to change browsers? Firefox’s 180 million users is the indicative of this, and not all of them user adblockers, so the numbers keep getting thinner.
It wouldn’t make a single dent in Chrome’s dominance.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox
This is the hypothetical we are talking about. This is obviously not realistic so i dont know what your point is.
Im using Firefox because fuck Google’s monopoly, but Firefox seems to care little for some stuff I think is critical, namely AV codec support. Lack of out of the box support for HEVC and a few others, which my underlying OS supports perfectly, is a big turn off.
May be time to give Opera a spin
I wish Firefox would build a tablet/scalable interface. It’s horrible on a tablet and breaks on DeX.
If you’re gonna use Opera anyway, why not just use Brave and disable the crypto stuff? The native adblocker on Brave is on par with uBlock Origin and performs even better. Opera is probably the worst direction you can go from where you are right now…
That’s true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend’s house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend’s been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.
What’s that? What? What’s with the ads? Oh that, that’s YT.
I know it is, but what’s with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them…
Installed adblocker for him, he’s looking at it in shock. I’m looking at him shocked…
People have no idea, what we take for granted. 😅
Yes I agree. If you are using adblocker you are already not an average user. Using A adblocker with custom filters put you on the extreme end and most of those users are either already on FF or have migrated to FF since the MV3 announcement.
And let’s not forget adblock made for MV3 will work well enough for those users who aren’t using adblocker with custom filters.
Even if Google kill off adblock completely with its browser, chrome will still be dominating the market by a huge margin.
Over half of all Americans use an ad blocker. It’s time to recognize that average users do block ads.
According to both websites, the research was conducted on just 2000 USA citizens. In my opinion, that’s a lot of weight being pulled by claiming they represent the entire country. I am unable to download the research papers here, but what does it say about the sample? If they are researching solely on more tech savvy people, then I think the results are very likely to be skewed to one side
Frankly, I’m not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.
Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in “48 markets”) use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.
My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they’re not just niche tools anymore.
I’m not really trying to disprove or disagree with anything, I just think that knowing the sample is important. For instance, earlier in Hungary, we’ve had a lot of billboards and other media claiming that 99% of Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine and gender affirming politics. In a purely statistical sense, this was correct and could dissuade the common folk into thinking that’s representative of the country. However when you investigate further, their research was done on just a couple thousand citizens that were all either affiliated someway to Fidesz (the rulling party) or historically voted for them, which overwhelmingly skews the results towards one end.
Hey, I think you’re totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn’t release the full data publicly, and the survey was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there’s reason to suspect that the data is biased.
I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don’t subscribe to their data service, I don’t have details of the methodology here, either.
Opera, being owned by Chinese big tech is probably the only “mainstream” browser I find worse than Chrome and I doubt it will have any measurable effect on Googles market dominance. Don’t get me wrong Google would absolutely deserve to trip and fall for the enshittification route they’re taking, but I don’t see how Opera could do what Firefox can’t when Opera is very reliant on Google.
I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera’s move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote it.
I know I’m a drop in the bucket but I have always been a diehard Google fanboy and, in the recent years, have switched to iOS, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. No regrets.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens! (Switched to Apple after 12 years of being an Android enthusiast.)
I also switched after about 10 years of dunking on iPhone users for accepting locked up phones with inferior hardware.
Turns out the software experience is a lot better and if you want access to your banking apps, you have to keep your Androids locked up nowadays anyway. I’d always ran custom roms, but one day I couldn’t anymore so I thought long and hard and in the end just went to the nearest Apple store and bought an iPhone.
If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
Safari is WebKit, which branched off from Chrome when Google forked WebKit into Blink. So they’re like siblings.
Technically, Chrome branched off from Safari when they forked WebKit into Blink…
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
Opera Browser (before it was sold to a Chinese company) did have its own browser engine before it went Chromium. It was called Presto. source. The team that used to own/run Opera before the sale to China formed again to make the Vivaldi browser.
Vivaldi and Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 addons (like uBlock Origin) until July 2025. The article doesn’t say how long Opera will continue, but I’m guessing its the same deadline of July too.
Presto era Opera was fantastic. At the time Firefox was kinda stagnating and Opera was just innovating.
You might like Vivaldi, they’re the most innovative chromium derived browser that I’ve used
I love Vivaldi. Am sad it’s Chromium. Wish Firefox would take a page out of Vivaldi’s features book and innovation approach.
So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?
Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek
So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?
Technically Chromium is based on Safari to some degree, but they split ways a long, long time ago.
Ladybird is eventually going to be a brand new browser on its’ own engine, hopefully.
Servo is being worked on again, so that’s something.
They explain nothing. They’re in the same boat as all others: open source will let them keep MV2 longer than mainstream chrome, but that future is uncertain as the main project codebase starts to evolve around MV3 and backward compatibility to hack MV2 back in gets lost over time. Nobody here can make promises, and sites that make that make those judgments are naive.
Doesn’t even matter since it is a Chinese browser. Anyway, the only way to potentially save the www, is to massively take away market share for Chromium based browsers. And unfortunately I doubt this will happen. Since last year, Chrome market share went up, while Firefox market share went down. People are clearly too stupid to make their own fucking decisions.
