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Antient ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    Fish ,

    I wouldn’t recommend Brave for 3 main reasons:

    1. Chromium-based
    2. Funded by venture capitalists
    3. Supported by crypto and ads

    Unfortunately, Firefox and its forks are really the only alternative to Chrome.

    sleepybisexual ,

    Also the whole brave CEO being a homophobic prick. Also that adblock will probably break under v3

    Antient ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    sleepybisexual ,

    Nice, doesn’t excuse the CEO tho

    Antient ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    sleepybisexual ,

    Good, and CEO are kinda mutually exclusive

    technocrit ,

    I’m pro-crypto enough that I tried Brave but anti-crypto enough that I had to stop.

    The popup ads were melting my brain and the payment wasn’t worth it.

    tangentism ,

    Google isn’t blocking one of the biggest adblockers. It’s killing chrome!

    Those who aren’t using an adblock won’t notice any difference but everyone else will just migrate to a non chromium browser

    communist ,
    @communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

    This will incentivize businesses to only support chrome

    DragonTypeWyvern ,

    I’m fine with not supporting them then.

    CynicusRex , (edited )
    @CynicusRex@lemmy.ml avatar

    On desktop, either use:

    On Android:

    HK65 ,

    At this point, using Firefox and an ad blocker does more for the climate than paper straws or recycling.

    Even with ad blocking, half of consumer internet traffic is ads. Google is contributing to increasing this ratio, where most traffic on the internet will be stuff the client did not request, contributing more to climate change than Bitcoin - not that this makes crypto look better, they are just a useful milestone to compare to with the press they get.

    And this doesn’t include the idiotic AI shit they do.

    Ashelyn ,

    I’m pretty sure the traffic for the ads still gets sent to your device over the Internet, it’s just that the ad blocker keeps it from rendering in your browser.

    Rinox ,

    No, the adblocker usually blocks the request before the data gets sent to the device. It’s why pages load faster with an adblocker

    HK65 ,

    It’s a mixed bag. Some ads (like some Youtube stuff I guess) are bundled and filtered, but most actually rely on external requests to ad exchanges. What happens mostly is that when there is an ad spot in the page you downloaded, that is in fact a generic request to an ad broker to send an ad instead of a specific ad. That then starts a real time bidding process inside multiple broker networks to find the most expensive (for the advertiser) ad they can show you based on your tracking information and demographics.

    And that’s for every ad spot. It’s insanely intricate and frankly wasteful.

    FlashMobOfOne ,
    @FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org avatar

    Yet another reason to use Brave, which has better native ad block than any of the other browsers.

    blackris ,
    @blackris@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    Meh, Brave is still Chroium. Even if they continue to support manifest v2, even today the are selling „good“ ads to the users. That and the Crypto bullshit they tried a while ago makes them untrustworthy in my eyes.

    Firefox is the only real alternative.

    FlashMobOfOne ,
    @FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org avatar

    Brave is still Chroium

    And yet, it does a better job blocking YouTube ads than Firefox, without any add-ons.

    Crypto, Ads

    Those features are opt-in.

    princessnorah ,
    @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    You mean by building the add-on directly into the browser? No thanks. I like my browser dev to work on my browser and my ad-block dev to work on my ad-block. They are both good at what they do on their own, I don’t need them to mix.

    Those features are opt-in.

    They are now. They were opt-out to begin with. This is one of those “fool me twice” situations. That, and the founder of Brave is also an outspoken homophobe. He financially backed Prop 8 in California to overturn same-sex marriage, and left Firefox because it was too woke. I seriously would rather Chrome at that point. They’re just regular levels of corporate evil, not “every person who uses my browser is proving my identity politics” level of evil.

    FlashMobOfOne , (edited )
    @FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org avatar

    They are now.

    That’s what I don’t get with the Anti-Brave crowd. Brave learns their users don’t like a feature and then they do better. This would, to me, be indicative of the way things should proceed.

    Meanwhile Firefox is moving backwards.

    By all means, use a browser that doesn’t work as well, but maybe don’t run a circle jerk of trolls whenever someone offers a better-working alternative.

    princessnorah ,
    @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    Personally, I think I should be able to expect a company to understand their target demographic well enough to know that those “features” wouldn’t be well received. But I also personally don’t consider ads and crypto garbage to be features. I guess if you do, then it’s the perfect browser for you. However, I don’t really want to contribute to Google’s monopolisation of browser engine development anymore. Nor do I want to use a browser developed by a homophobe. So even if Brave may be slightly “better-working” I would not consider it better at all.

    As well, even though I’m a Blahaj member, I’m going to take the time to point out the “Bee Nice” rule of the instance we’re currently on. It feels like you’re skirting dangerously close to violating that, considering you implied I’m a troll for calling out the prejudicial politics of the founder of a piece of software, which you didn’t at all address in your comment. I’m going to attach some resources about it here, if you care to read them at all:

    1. pinknews.co.uk/…/javascript-inventor-gave-1000-to…
    2. arstechnica.com/…/gay-firefox-developers-boycott-…
    3. arstechnica.com/…/mozilla-employees-to-brendan-ei…
    4. tim.dreamwidth.org/1844711.html
    5. modelviewculture.com/…/killing-the-messenger-at-m…
    6. tim.dreamwidth.org/1852118.html
    7. community.brave.com/t/…/281044

    (Some of these are older, about the push for him to step down as Mozilla CEO, some are newer and urging him to leave Brave, or for people to boycott it.)

    Xero ,
    @Xero@infosec.pub avatar

    No thanks Brendan Eich the CEO of Brave is a piece of shit.

    moonpiedumplings , (edited )

    Google put an API into Chrome that sends extra system info but only to*.google.com domains. In every Chromium browser.

    Only vivaldi caught this issue. Brave had this api enabled, most likely on accident.

    But the problem is, that chromium is just such big and complex software, when combined with development being driven by Google, it’s just impossible for any significant changes or auditing to be done by third parties. Google is capable of exteriting control over Brave, simply by hiding changes like above, or by making massive changes like manifest v3, which are expensive for third parties to maintain.

    Brave can maintain 1 big change to chromium, but for how long? What about 2, 3, etc.

    My other big problem with brave is that I see them somewhat mimicking Google’s beginnings. Google started out with 3 things: an ad network, a browser, and a search engine.

    Right now, Brave has those same three things. It feels very ominous to me, and I would rather not repeat the cycle of enshittification that drove me away from chrome and goolgle.

    Mio ,

    Block Chrome and use anything not Chrome based. In other words use Firefox.

    LarmyOfLone ,

    But Firefox is about to loose it’s funding because google is a monopoly lol

    fwygon ,

    Firefox is open source. It’s not going anywhere; even if Mozilla Co. goes broke and closes down the Mozilla Foundation.

    LarmyOfLone ,

    Sure. But loosing the money to fund development surely won’t help, will it? My point is that there is a real danger here. There are other forces at play which is why you have the chrome dominance already. Long term firefox will fall behind if not maintained. There really needs to be a push to finance firefox or alternatives.

    Or imagine if more and more websites “require” some new web protocol to prevent ad blocking, or use of DMCA against browsers or addons altering websites as “web apps”. This is another problem that cannot be solved through individual responsibility.

    Mio ,

    So Google is a monopoly and removing funding to Firefox will help them not to be a monopoly? That does not sound right. Rather the opposite.

    Nothing has been decided or done yet. Most likely they will just be forced to not abuse their position, for example make ads for it on www.google.com, don’t bundle Chrome with Android and such things.

    I believe there will always be an alternative to Chrome available as the Open Source community will find a way together.

    LarmyOfLone ,

    See here The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla’s revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox’s default search engine - lemm.ee

    NutWrench ,
    @NutWrench@lemmy.ml avatar

    Google has been telegraphing this for months. Either switch browsers now or enjoy your ads.

    JackbyDev , (edited )

    They’ve literally said ad blockers are a threat to their revenue www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/…/goog10-kq42018.htm

    Risks Related to Our Businesses and Industries

    […]

    New and existing technologies could affect our ability to customize ads and/or could block ads online, which would harm our business.

    Technologies have been developed to make customizable ads more difficult or to block the display of ads altogether and some providers of online services have integrated technologies that could potentially impair the core functionality of third-party digital advertising. Most of our Google revenues are derived from fees paid to us in connection with the display of ads online. As a result, such technologies and tools could adversely affect our operating results.

    princessnorah ,
    @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    It’s not exactly super helpful to just link to an 86 page SEC filing. Maybe you could provide a quote?

    JackbyDev ,

    Ctrl F for “block”. There were only 5 usages of the word and that led me to the section.

    princessnorah ,
    @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    That’s nice. A quote still would have been more approachable for most, while those that were more curious could have followed the link to the document.

    JackbyDev ,

    I have some time now, I’ll grab it and edit it in

    coffeetest ,

    Use DNS filtering. I use NextDNS which has a free tier that meets my needs. You can add popular filter lists and your browser will never even see those ads, trackers etc. Or you can use Vivaldi and Firefox of course. But DNS cuts it off before it even gets to your machine.

    adarza ,

    dns blocking methods do not, and literally cannot, block them all.

    B0rax ,

    DNS filtering only gets you so far. An adblocker is still a very good addition

    princessnorah ,
    @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    a free tier

    Alternatively, you can just host this stuff yourself and never pay. A Pihole is just DNS-filtering. There’s a million guides to do this on the internet already. You can also do it more directly with some routers, I run DNS filtering on an ASUS router with the merlin third-party firmware. It’s possibly the simplest thing you can host yourself. Like others have pointed out though, it isn’t a replacement for uBO. They both complement each other and I would recommend both to people who are able. The one major advantage it has is being able to block some ads in mobile apps. But it cannot block as many in a browser.

    avidamoeba ,
    @avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

    Perhaps this will bug people who currently use Chrome and uBO to switch browsers.

    ColonelPanic ,

    This coming down the line finally got me off of my incredibly lazy ass and forced me to switch a few months ago. It was easy, and I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner.

    ShepherdPie ,

    I use Firefox everywhere except work where my only options are Chrome or Edge (both chromium). Apparently uBlock lite is supposed to work on the new version of Chrome and hopefully still functions roughly the same. Apart from block web ads, I rely on it to block YouTube ads.

    stealth_cookies ,

    I wish I could for work. But stupid corporate policy demands otherwise, Google workspace is so shit.

    avidamoeba ,
    @avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

    Oh no judgment at all, I’m also using Chrome at work and somewhat outside of work.

    adarza ,

    i did read somewhere that affected chrome users are being presented with alternatives from the chrome extension ‘store’ that are mv3-ready.

    whether or not they’re capable of clicking the right buttons on the right screens and windows to do it is another story.

    ubo, abp and adguard all have mv3 variants. there are others, but i think those are the ‘big three’. ublock origin lite is what i’ve been moving people to here, if not to firefox. so far, so good.

    viking ,
    @viking@infosec.pub avatar

    I think the lite versions don’t allow scripted blocking, only static or something. So a whole lot of the adaptive blocks for persistent ads you encounter on facebook, instagram and other shitty socials that behave like viruses will be hard to impossible to kill.

    I’m glad I never had to deal with that as I have never used Chrome on desktop, but I’m pretty sure there will be many folks out there who don’t know how to switch.

    LiveLM ,

    They’ll switch from Chrome to Cryptocurrency flavored Chrome and think all is well in the world.

    orcrist ,

    The garbage is taking itself out

    psycocan ,

    Ungoogled Chromium

    Dhs92 ,

    Or, hear me out, Firefox

    Kolanaki ,
    @Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

    Firefox: “I’m listening.”

    Sabata11792 ,

    Advertiser: “I know.”

    psycocan ,

    I left the firefox camp about a couple of weeks ago. First, it has huge memory consumption on linux (seems more like leaks) and my RAM is 16 Gigs. The recent decisions and the light shed on mozilla priorities actually made me realize that Mozilla is on the same train as evil corporates like Google. Ungoogled chromium seems the better choice to me atm

    Ilandar ,

    Have you tried the various Firefox forks? If one of your primary problems with Firefox is a belief that they are “evil like Google” then switching to a browser developed by Google and further entrenching their monopoly on the market is a very strange decision.

    tate ,

    Will this change be implemented in Chromium too? Or will it / should it finally become independent of Chrome?

    abrahambelch ,
    @abrahambelch@programming.dev avatar

    I guess so. I don’t get your second point however. Chromium is as independent from Google/Chrome as your banking app from your bank account.

    tate ,

    I thought the situation was a little like Android. Google develops an open source version (along with as many independent developers who wish to contribute), then sticks on a bunch of proprietary BS and sells that version to phone companies. If chromium is to chrome like vanilla android is to android with g-services, then I guess my question really becomes: is google making this change in the underlying code base, or just in the BS they put on top?

    Or am I confused about how the connection works between chrome and chromium?

    abrahambelch ,
    @abrahambelch@programming.dev avatar

    Now I get your point. Technically, I think it could be possible to only include the changes in Chrome. It would make sense for Google to push the changes all the way down to Chromium, though, as this would eliminate ad blockers on many competing browsers as well. Judging based on the past I would say this is what’s gonna happen

    adarza ,

    yes, it will.

    whether or not a ‘fully functional’ and fully-featured content blocker remains available for third-party browsers that use chromium as their core will depend on those third-parties and what they add, or add back, to their own releases to support those kinds of browser extensions.

    Cube6392 ,

    The ad company blocking an ad blocker is totally about security

    • Google stans
    skullgiver , (edited )
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    But they’re not blocking ad blockers. They’re restricting a huge attack surface which has the side effect of making it harder to build ad blockers. With this change, extensions can “only” alter/inspect/redirect/block 30,000 domains if they use the webRequest API. That’s not enough to build uBlock Origin with, but at least there’s limit now.

    Google should add a specific ad blocking API (though I suppose that name would run afoul of market competition laws, so maybe they’d need to workshop that stuff info “content enhancers” or whatever) before removing the ability for extensions to hide/block/redirect/alter arbitrary requests, but the way extension’s currently work is pretty terrible.

    It’s all fun and games if uBlock Origin uses this API, but if one of your other extensions get bought out by a Chinese malware company, you’d be wondering why “save downloads to Nextcloud” and “remove Google search bar from the browser home page” were able to steal all the money out of your checking account and open several credit cards in your name.

    Google’s approach sucks, but in my opinion other browsers should show stronger warnings when installing extensions with access to everything you do in a browser (and outside it, if you screen share).

    I don’t really care about Chrome, Chrome users can just download another browser if they don’t like ads. I do care about the risks in other browsers, and browsers need to do a lot better communicating and compartmentalising this risk to end users.

    BumpingFuglies ,

    This is the most succinct, unbiased explanation I’ve seen for this change. Thank you for this! It’s good to know there’s an unintended security improvement in their otherwise brazen attempt to kill ad blockers on Chrome.

    Fuck Google.

    p03locke ,
    @p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    With this change, extensions can “only” alter/inspect/redirect/block 30,000 domains if they use the webRequest API. That’s not enough to build uBlock Origin with, but at least there’s limit now.

    That seems like an arbitrary number. Why not 20,000? Or 300,000? What the hell is this limit even for? Even malware can still target 10 domains and do some significant damage. So, what the hell is the point?

    Remember, politicians don’t pass racist laws by directly saying they are excluding PoC into the law. They do it by targeting commonalities that happen to apply to PoC.

    Google isn’t going to flat-out say they are blocking uBlock Origin. They are going to do it by implementing “security features” that just so happen to target only uBlock Origin.

    skullgiver ,
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    Personally, I would’ve lowered the size of this was about security. Make it a nice, round number, like 1024.

    I think it must’ve been based on something like “the declarative layout is x KB per entry so if we assume the file can be 10MB at most we get about 30k entries”. Maybe they documented it somewhere, I don’t know.

    I think it’s clear that a security concern has been hijacked by the ad people. If it was just about security, some other content blocking API would’ve been set up. Safari on iOS has content blockers and that doesn’t even use web extensions, so clearly there are software design models that allow blocking without the “read any website data any time” risk that WebExtensions pose.

    But these features don’t just target ad blockers. It also affects other extensions, like Stylus for user CSS, or TamperMonkey for user scripts. It also affects other content blockers, of course. The big difference is that most extensions that require permanent access to every resource on every page are either ad blockers, malware, or power user scripts.

    coffeetest ,

    “For the security” is starting to sound a lot like “for the children”. I hope this works out better than secure boot. When these new ideas emerge that have, let’s call them, “side effects” like disabling ad-blockers or preventing Linux from being installed I am suspicious.

    skullgiver ,
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    Google clearly shows their intent by not providing an alternative API for content filtering, but that doesn’t mean there are no security concerns. Malicious extensions have become so prevalent that Mozilla had to switch to only permitting signed extensions (despite community outroar) because shitty companies were inserting their extensions into the users’ profile directory without permission and breaking websites and even Firefox itself in some cases.

    Secure Boot requires the user to be able to turn it off, so if it gets in the way of anyone, it’s implemented wrong. Microsoft has a weird certification system for “super duper secure” laptops or whatever they call it where only their private key is loaded, but that’s a small amount of expensive business laptops.

    If anything, Secure Boot is an example of the “just let me turn it off if I want to” crowd making computers less secure for the majority because Microsoft allows booting a whole bunch of Linux distros on supposedly locked-down systems, which has been proven to make other attacks possible (like that recent one on Lenovo laptops where a Linux boot disk could insert a fingerprint into the fingerprint reader that would unlock TPM-based encryption).

    Nobody is preventing you from installing Linux through secure boot. In fact, you can take control of your secure boot settings and prevent anyone from installing Windows on your computer without your password.

    adarza ,

    if google cared, they’d vet ads and ad links, and guarantee their safety and security.

    if google cared, they’d put a stop to seo ‘optimizers’ and scammers scoring top positions on serps.

    but google doesn’t care about anything other than their profits and share price.

    adblockers can affect both of those. they’re using the weak cover of ‘security’ enhancement to neuter them.

    existing adblockers provide more safety and security than what can be realized by the shift to mv3.

    DeForrest_McCoy ,

    With this from chrome, and Reddit going paywalls do you think we’ll see another spike in Lemmy traffic…i think it’s a safe bet.

    Sabata11792 ,

    They have already been coming in over the last week since the announcement.

    FreeBooteR69 ,
    @FreeBooteR69@lemmy.ca avatar

    Fuck chrome, FF ftw.

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