- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox::Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.
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i’ve been on Firefox in the last 8 years. i don’t even know what’s going on in Chrome and other browsers lol.
Same… I don’t understand the appeal of Chrome. I think they used a new java engine like 10 years ago and beat Firefox in a handful of benchmarks, and then Firefox conclusively and irreconcilably trounced Chrome a few months later, never letting up a bit.
I remember when they released Firefox Quantum. Too many tabs was never a problem again.
I mean I tried to download the official minecraft client for debian and was not able to on Firefox.
Microsoft disabled the site on non Chrome browser
This sounded weird to me, so I just tried it. Running Firefox on Kubuntu, I just downloaded it with one click from here.
Well didn’t work for me on debian
Just tried it myself and it doesn’t have any issues at all. It seems like it might be an issue with something else on your end.
Though honestly I’d strongly recommend against using the Official launcher as it has been known to introduce bugs and in general has poorer support for mods. I prefer the MultiMC forks like Prism, which don’t have the bugs the official one does.
I wanted sth that is updated by my system and the flatpak I found logged me in as a unsecure user or I had to login at each launch
user agent switching is fortunately not too difficult to do.
Are you sure? I just tested and after logging in, the option to download the launcher was there (popos/firefox).
Maybe my adblocker is the issue
I love Firefox. Love it.
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Chrome seems to have such a foothold that it is getting away with embrace/extend/extinguish and I think it’s a very sad thing.
Give me examples. I’ve been using Firefox exclusively for over ten years and I can recall one website I’ve had to use chrome on. That was draw.io to get shared drawing through a Google drive to work.
For me there are certain sites where the site icon doesn’t show up in my bookmarks. While not world shattering, it can be annoying.
That’s such bullshit. People keep saying SO MANY SITES DONT WORK ON FOREFUX
with zero examples.
I see no examples. You’re making a ridiculous claim with no proof and I’m astounded at how many people believe you here.
I think someone needs a hug.
I still see only empty claims lawl
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Reminder for others that they can report to Web Compat
This is a good comment! I’ve reported to them in the past. A good reminder.
This is an especially common problem on Android. I have found many sites whose mobile version simply does not work in Firefox. It’s very frustrating.
I also feel their number grew in the last year. I’ve recently tried using Mull again (mobile firefox privacy-focused fork) after using Bromite for a year, and it was so unbearable I had to switch back. I’d say I had less websites that worked than ones that did not
Unfortunately tracker blocking can lead to even more issues as many sites have started relying on it for basic functionality.
Have you got an example I can test? I switched to Firefox mobile over a year ago and I can’t think of any time I’ve come across a site that didn’t work.
The most recent issue I had was Birds and Beans “manage subscription” page so I don’t think you can test that without a coffee subscription. But here is a screenshot:
I’m not sure why it says “nightly” as I’m on the stable version.
This isn’t Firefoxs fault though, is it? Just a bad Website putting arbitrary restrictions in place
Not Firefox’s fault at all. Just a website not following web standards.
We should add another E… Embrace, extend, extinguish and enshittify.
That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.
I personally can’t remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.
Discord and spotify web versions don’t work on Firefox for me. On discord in can’t connect to a call and Spotify doesn’t play songs or it takes a long time after pressing play for the song to start playing.
Both work flawlessly for me. In fact, discord on Firefox works much better than the standalone app specifically for calls.
Sounds to me like something is broken or misconfigured on your system.
Firefox is my daily driver, but oooh how I miss native tab groups like they have on most chromium browsers right in the tab bar. Extensions like simple tab groups just hit differently and are inferior…
Are there any settings you can tweak in the about:config page? That’s how you have to enable the compact tab size, which is annoying.
I feel you. STG is the best addon I could find, I tried Floorp but it just was not the same thing.
I totally agree. Especially now that you can save the tab groups like bookmarks (experimental flag in chromium)
The people who know what UBO or a firefox even is is the vast minority. Google could single handedly completely fuck over the free internet and a majority still wouldn’t give a fuck as long as they get that sweet sweet one click convinence. The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options. They just want their shit to work, privacy and daddy google violating their basic human rights be damned.
Oh and also some websites make it a huge pain in the ass if you aren’t using chromium. I think its a bit of a conspiracy but could be wrong.
Also stop shilling firefox and start shilling Librewolf
is librewolf on mobile?
Nope only desktop. FF on mobile does have UBO available to install and I hear they are making plans to have all desktop addons be available on mobile at some point. I use kiwi browser for mobile. It is unfortunately chromium based but lets you install all the desktop adds from the chrome store including UBO
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The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options.
Doesn’t this apply to most things? Phones, laptops, desktops…and cars, refrigerators, garage door openers, light bulbs, etc etc
Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?
I’ve never seen any websites use it… btw mozilla kinda abuses widevine by running it in an isolated container (because no one wants proprietary drm software running directly on their machines!)
I wouldn’t really call that an abuse.
is there a word for good kind of abuse (?)
I switched from Chrome and it was seamless. After a few weeks I didn’t notice any negative difference.
Or you can DNS level blocking + NewPipe(SponsorBlock)
I mean you can do that and use Firefox, it’s not going to hurt.
Yeah I definitely have to try Firefox at least to know how it run nowdays.
dns level blocking doesn’t work nearly as well as ublock. Not sure what newpipe is (checking it out now), but pihole misses a ton of things that ublock can do. Ublock can also hide elements from things like “disable your ad blocker” messages that always pop up.
I’m definitely wanting to swap back to firefox, but idk who the hell decided to remove PWA support from FF… hopefully they bring that back.
Yeah DNS blocking it’s not perfect but it works almost on all apps WO having to install anything in the OS, I’m using right now NextDNS+NewPipe(SponsorBlock)+ViMusic+Brave and everything it’s going smooth AF. For services like Facebook and YouTube you need forcedly use a free front-end or a modded app.
pi-hole works great for blocking ads on IoT devices. My number one client that gets the most blocks from my pi-hole is my Roku device.
Don’t use Brave, LibreWolf is far better and unlike Brave it doesn’t support the Chromium monopoly
Is there any good alternative for Brave over Android?
Mull is great
I will check it mate thx for the info 👍👍
pihole misses a ton of things that ublock can do
This seems like more of an issue of the adlists you use in pihole. Pihole’s blocking is only as good as the adlists you use on it. I’ve been running a pihole on my home network for years, and I find that as long as I take a few minutes to update the adlists (add new ones, remove dead ones) once or twice a year, it nukes nearly everything. And it’s amazing for blocking things on IoT devices where ublock origin will never be a thing.
Also, they’re not mutually exclusive – one can certainly use both. I use pihole on my home network, and run ffox + UBO on my computers and phone.
There are ads baked in to some websites. Facebook ads make it past pihole.
I personally use both at home I’m just saying pihole doesn’t get everything that unlock does so I always run both
+1 for DNS level ad/tracker blocking. Everyone should check out NextDNS or self host Pi-Hole.
You should still use Firefox or LibreWolf though. Mull is awesome on mobile, it’s the closest thing to LibreWolf.
For YouTube, you can use alternative clients like Piped or Invidious in combination with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links. On mobile, I recommend LibreTube for Android, Yattee with this guide on iOS and SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
👍👍 thx for the info mate…
Remember when Firefox started dealing damage to IE’s insane monopoly, and then Chrome came along and shanked them both?
I hope Chrome finally eats dirt after basically becoming knockoff IE 2.
Literally every new HTTP standard is coming out of Google’s dev team. That is not a good thing.
Considering, the mobile browser also has addons and will gain hundreds more in a few months. It’s a no-brainer.
This. Youtube is getting progressively more annoying (my train to switch on PC), but what pushed me was Dark Reader on mobile.
I’m trying to make the switch to Firefox, but I’m running into some issues. The main one being, I travel internationally a lot for work and rely heavily on chrome automatically translating every web page I visit. Is there a way to have this on both my desktop and mobile (android)? When I look at the available extensions there are like 15 available… Thankfully one of them is uBlock Origin
Firefox does now have built-in page translation that runs offline. While it’s not the best one out there it only needs to connect to the internet once to download the translation data.
I know they recently put the feature in the desktop, did they dobit on mobile too tho?
FF doesn’t do that I think. There are addons that u can use for it though.
for anyone wondering, there’s already a manifest v3 version of ublock origin available from the same developer.
Yes but ubol (ublock origin lite) , is limited in what it can block. It may or may not affect users, depending on how they had ubo configured.
See the author’s FAQ:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)
I only install UBO and never configure it, so perhaps UBOL will be fine
as long as you set it to ‘Optimal’ or ‘Complete’ it’s going to be able to block YouTube ads for example. that’s the main thing I missed while trying out dns adblockers and as such it’s definitely not too limited for me
It’s a shame that Firefox is still heavily reliant on Google. It’s not chrome but we really do need some competition in this space that doesn’t feed the monster and is also not safari lol.
How does it rely on Google?
Something like 90% of Mozilla’s funding comes from Google paying them to make Google the default search engine in Firefox.
Why settle for less anyway, Firefox all the way
Why settle for less
Because I’m a tool.
I’d largely like to agree. My main issue is as others have said, some websites don’t work on Firefox due to Chrome basically being the standard. It’s annoying. And I do think people should still switch and try their best to stop using Chrome. Because IF we could get to a point where Firefox has a larger audience than it already has, the problem may end up stopping due to developers having more of a need to make sure their stuff is cross compatible with other browsers.
I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don’t work in FF are very rare. If it’s something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there’s an easy way to work around it.
I actually encountered the opposite. A site I’ve been using for roughly 7 years actually has massive issues on chrome that makes it unusable.
On Firefox? No problem at all.
Which site? Just curious. I’ve never encountered any issues whatsoever with either browser.
Decades old Firefox user here.
In the last week or two both Discord as well as Google Maps started not to work, they basically freeze up during/after they load, almost freezing up the whole browser as well (struggle to close the tabs they are on).
The weird thing is they both always used to work great up to just very recently, and nothing else has changed on my desktop, except for the normal OS updates semi daily.
(Speaking of the desktop version, on Fedora Linux.)
some websites don’t work on Firefox
Are you sure? Is there a list of these websites? I’ve been primarily using FF for a decade and haven’t encountered any.
Same. Usually it’s a case of “the site is broken on both”, or a hard refresh is needed, so switching browsers feels like it works
I’ve had some map sites that just refuse to work on ff
Have you tried spoofing your User Agent to Chrome with a user agent switcher extension? The site might actually work in Firefox.
I never had that issue, untill starting last week. Now Google Maps won’t work, for some reason.
It worked for years before that, it’s a recent thing, in my case at least. Makes me wonder what’s going on.
Unfortunately there really are websites that don’t work in Firefox. Not a nice list, but issues should be reported here: https://webcompat.com/issues?page=1&per_page=50&state=open&stage=all&sort=updated&direction=desc&q=label%3Abrowser-firefox usable
Personally, I have been using Firefox for years and will continue using it.
Firefox also has a builtin list of overrides at about:compat
I don’t have any specific list. But I have ran into a few issues with Firefox. (mostly on my IPhone) In my experience Firefox on Mobile is just up to par with Desktop.
Firefox on iOS is Safari under the hood.
I agree, run Firefox as your main and then a privacy focused fork of Chromium as your second if you need it for specific website.
Personally I barely ever encounter issues with websites running FF.
You can file web compatibility bugs on bugzilla.mozilla.org or webcompat.com
There are different ways how bugs are fixed. But someone might reach out to the page itself, find and fix a bug in Firefox or change the web specification if the incompatibility arises from ambiguity around the feature definition.
Firefox can also ship an intervention, basically injecting code into certain websites to fix broken ones.
Some incompatibilities can arise from missing features in Firefox, the web constantly evolves and the Devs sometimes don’t catch up. But bugs might still help, as high compatibility-risk features might be implemented more quickly.
Can you list the websites? I feel like this issue is sufficiently rare to be inexistent for the vast majority of users.
People always say “MUH WEBSITE BORKED ON FIREFOX” and never give examples.
I like Librewolf better
I.e. Firefox
Whatever forks you choose, they’d better be based off Gecko-based browsers, and the only one now is Firefox (and all that forked from it)
Librewolf is firefox without the bloat.
Yes, essentially. But that’s still Firefox, and it makes sense to refer to it as such when talking about global things like Manifest V2 support, adblocking, and other basic functional blocks from eagle view.
And then we can go into details and talk about differences between Firefox forks, Librewolf being just one of the most popular. This is important to talk about, just not in this particular context.
It’s like uniting and arguing in favor of Linux regardless of the distros - distro wars are still valid, but not something we should immediately load onto a Windows user. Heck, even if person goes for a goddamn Ubuntu, it will be an improvement. Same logic.
