We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.2 Daly Barnett. “Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening.” EFF, December 9, 2021. ↩ Lawrence Abrams. “Google warns uBlock Origin and other extensions may be disabled soon.” Bleeping Computer, October 13, 2024. ↩

We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.

Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.

I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.

This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!

  • underthesign@lemmy.worldEnglish
    416·
    2 months ago

    Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on, because I’m personally very bored with my kids’ schools and related services sending out emails and forms with links that simply won’t open in FF but are clearly expecting Chrome or Edge where they work fine. Yes, this is on the lazy developers, but if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups then this is the stuff they must fix.

    • gerbler@lemmy.worldEnglish
      741·
      2 months ago

      I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If your site doesn’t work on Firefox your site doesn’t work. As web developers your job is to develop applications for the web not for one specific browser. This goes double for essential services.

    • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
      25·
      2 months ago

      Firefox can’t fix all the broken sites in the world, but they do investigate issues reported to https://webcompat.com

      You can help by reporting sites that don’t work for you.

    • tehmics@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      2 months ago

      Okay that’s fine, but when websites are effectively writing

      if user_agent_string != [chromium]
     break;

      It doesn’t really matter how good compatibility is. I’ve had websites go from nothing but a “Firefox is not supported, please use Chrome” splash screen to working just fine with Firefox by simply spoofing the user agent to Chrome. Maybe some feature was broken, but I was able to do what I needed. More often than not they just aren’t testing it and don’t want to support other browsers.

      The more insidious side of this is that websites will require and attempt to enforce Chrome as adblocking gets increasingly impossible on them, because it aligns with their interests. It’s so important for the future of the web that we resist this change, but I think it’s too late.

      The world wide web is quickly turning into the dark alley of the internet that nobody is willing to walk down.

      • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        As a developer, I can foresee websites using features other than navigator.userAgent to detect Chrome, because it’s easy to change its value. For example: for now, navigator.getBattery is available only in Chromium, and it doesn’t need permissions to be checked for its existence through typeof navigator.getBattery === 'function' (also, the function seems to be perfectly callable without user intervention, enabling additional means of fingerprinting). While it’s easy to spoof userAgent, it’s not as easy to “mock” unsupported APIs such as navigator.getBattery through Firefox.

    • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      What you’re talking about is webcompat and is a very complicated issue. Also I’ve talked to some Mozilla devs who gave me multiple examples of Chromium rendering something wrong, and they’d have to intentionally break Firefox to render it incorrectly too, just so the end user would get a more consistent experience. Of course these issues happen more and more when things are only tested for one browser.

      • Yi K@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        This is Chromium monopoly. At this time instead of W3C standards, Chromium itself becomes the standard.

      • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        Maybe there could be some sort of compatibility flag in Firefox which detects non-standard pages designed for Chrome. We could call it… hmm… something like Quirks Mode?

    • kava@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      2 months ago

      I can’t think of a single example where a web page doesn’t work on FF.

      if FF want wider scale take-up outside of geeky niche groups

      Lol. I remember when FF was the most popular browser.

      • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I just need a „install as app“ Feature in Firefox, that is not as pain as the webapp Manager app we currently have

          • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Install PWA so that you can start those as normal native apps without it looking like a website in a browser (remove unnecessary window decorations) and cache js for ever, so that the PWA can be used offline, if features are not dependant on API calls

          • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            I guess, I only know the way on iPhone using “add to homescreen”

        • kava@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Around 2009~2011 if I remember correctly. Back then it was either IE or FF. Then Chrome came on the scene with their fancy marketing ads and blew up very quickly to overtake FF.

          At the time FF felt bloated compared to Chrome, so Chrome was like the fresh new and faster alternative.

    • The Menemen!@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      Can you send me an example? I don’t think I ever really encountered those sites and I use FF almost exclusively for ~20 years.

      • Rekorse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Its a frequency of use thing, and also some required sites. Examples are sites hosted by schools, government, or workplaces.

        Although most people using Firefox aren’t aware of spoofing the client to look like chrome, so that might need to be talked about more.

        That all said, I don’t have problems with any required usage, the only ones I have an issue with are on my phone, using mull, some sites payment forms won’t load or work correctly. Taco bell is pretty bad for that and then the app wouldnt work either for a while. I also run grapheneos though so its hard to say what’s the cause there.

        • The Menemen!@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 months ago

          Hm, okay. Maybe it’s just a US government page thing then. Here in Germany firefox is still at 20% and used to be the standard browser until 5-6 years ago, so maybe pages are still optimized for it here.

          • Rekorse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            It varies state to state here as well. Someone in Georgia might have way more problems than someone in Minnesota. Its hard to generalize the US in that way. Sort of like the EU being a group but each country separate.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, unfortunately the next step will be sites rejecting “unsecure” browsers because they want the ad money.

      This is going to get worse, not better.

    • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      Firefox needs to work on ensuring seamless compatibility with more websites, web apps and so on

      Care to share some examples Firefox has trouble with? The only issues I have with websites is due to my aggressive use of Noscript.

      • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        There’s some streaming video sites that deliberately block Firefox. It used to be that Firefox didn’t support the necessary web standards, but now it does. The site put up blocks telling you to use Chrome, and never got around to taking them down.

      • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        I’m on a Surface Pro, which is a somewhat weaker device. For whatever reason, Microsoft Edge (Chromium) runs YouTube and Twitch much better than Firefox. This might be due to efficiency in the browser, or the site video code itself being built for it.

    • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      I encounter this very infrequently. I think I only have 1-2 examples at work. It’s not a huge deal for me to spin up a chrome for those one or two occasions.

      • Damaskox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I recall I didn’t get some sites working on Chrome either, when Firefox fails me 😅

        • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
          21·
          2 months ago

          This is also true. The majority of the time when something doesn’t work on Firefox and I try to go to Chrome, it doesn’t work there too 😂

        • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Sounds interesting, care to expand?

          The only concrete one I can actually recollect is generating a quote from our quoting tool in Salesforce. I just ended up running my 100+ Salesforce windows in Chrome because it has a good feature where you can name each window so I can see which customers I’m working on in the taskbar. It’s good to have those cordoned off from my normal browsing anyway. So this one doesn’t bother me. For everything else I use Firefox.

          • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            I used this prompt

            I want to create an electron app for linux of a third party webapp

            How would I do that?

            And chatGPT gave me a good instruction, will try that out. Apparently, you only need node, electron and the javascript like this:

            
const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron')

function createWindow() {
  // Create the browser window
  const win = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 800,
    height: 600,
    webPreferences: {
      nodeIntegration: true
    }
  })

  // Load the third-party web app
  win.loadURL('https://www.thirdpartyapp.com')

  // Optionally remove the default menu
  win.setMenu(null)

  // Open DevTools (optional for debugging)
  // win.webContents.openDevTools()
}

// Run the createWindow function when Electron is ready
app.whenReady().then(createWindow)

// Quit when all windows are closed
app.on('window-all-closed', () => {
  if (process.platform !== 'darwin') {
    app.quit()
  }
})

app.on('activate', () => {
  if (BrowserWindow.getAllWindows().length === 0) {
    createWindow()
  }
})
              • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
                3·
                2 months ago

                Electron is a tool to bundle a website and a interpreter for that website in an application. That works on many platforms. Official discord desktop app, for example, is an electron app, spotify as well.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.comEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      It’s pretty trivial to just use an alternate browser for the garbage sites that don’t support FF.

    • potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fishEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      If I create a blank HTML file, every single web browser will open it perfectly fine. If I add browser-specific things that firefox doesn’t have, it is my responsibility to create an alternative that keeps the site working. A user shouldn’t have to switch browsers due to incompetence of webdevs.