Google Is Cracking Down on Ad Blockers, But Here's How You Can Fight Back
30 points
3 hours ago
| 14 comments
| lifehacker.com
| HN
whoitwas
2 hours ago
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Use Firefox. It's not much of a difference given the big picture, but makes sense to me.
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Ringz
2 hours ago
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I avoid Chrome based browsers for a long time now. Firefox (I use Floorp right now, but if they sell out it’s easy to switch back to pure Firefox) is not perfect but I never missed a single thing. If there is an interesting service or plugin that only works with Chrome, I press x (Surfingkeys) and move along.
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heresie-dabord
2 hours ago
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Although I remain a strong advocate of Firefox and Librewolf, the statistics for browser marketshare tell me that the vast majority of users does not care about blocking ads.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/545520/market-share-of-i...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

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vg_dev
2 hours ago
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As a user, I prefer Firefox more than any Chrome or chromium based browsers. As a developer, chrome dev tools is just more soother to make use of.
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amelius
2 hours ago
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Can we have a month per year without ads? Like Stoptober, but for ads?

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/stoptober-campaign-will-e...

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ryandvm
24 minutes ago
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Yeah, fuck this. Advertising is literally the root of so many of our social problems.

Advertising has completely gutted the news and information ecosystems to the point that every site is a rage-click race to the bottom.

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ecmascript
2 hours ago
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The only way of fighting back is stop using Chrome and preferrably chromium based browsers.

I recommend using https://librewolf.net/

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ulrikrasmussen
2 hours ago
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How can Google get away with this behavior legally? I am so disappointed that the most recent antitrust lawsuit that they "lost" regarding their search engine monopoly basically forced their hand to defund their only real competitor, thus making sure that they cannot get into trouble for killing it off to cement their other monopoly on the browser market. This vertical integration of being both a browser vendor and having a massive stake in how much browsers allow users to control how content is processed should have been stopped a long time ago by forcing them to split development of Chrome into a separate company.
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eqvinox
2 hours ago
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Google might still be about to get broken up, and that might be a good thing. Not betting on either, though.
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seaman1921
2 hours ago
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How can they get away for not providing you free services ?
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ceejayoz
2 hours ago
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

It’s entirely possible to be illegally anti-competitive while giving shit away for discount/free.

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beardyw
1 hour ago
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I think the sentiment was that without ad revenue Google could not afford to provide free services. As a rule, "stuff" costs someone something.
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NotYourLawyer
2 hours ago
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romanovcode
3 hours ago
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> Google's changing the ways ad blockers work on Chrome, but there are ways to get around it.

Yeah. Just use Safari, Firefox or Edge. I did not use Chrome for years now.

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weikju
3 hours ago
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It’s mentioned in the article. But they also mention Edge will follow along with deprecating Manifest v2 so it’s no help.
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Ringz
2 hours ago
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From the article:

„Google’s new rules will likely affect all Chromium browsers, including Chrome and Microsoft Edge (a support page from Microsoft shows that Edge is losing access to the Web Request API).“

Safari: I would love to use it, but Apple moved all plugins to the AppStore and killed the ecosystem.

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Hamuko
2 hours ago
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Doesn't Safari massively gimp ad blockers?
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pimeys
2 hours ago
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A good way to test the adblocker is with this website:

https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock

For me, Firefox and uBlock Origin on Linux and on Android both block 99-100% of ads.

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bombcar
2 hours ago
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AdGuard Pro for safari on iPhone got 84%. It works well enough for me - the sites that are so aggressive that ads get through I don’t visit.
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ulfw
30 minutes ago
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I get 100% with Adguard on iPhone Safari + nextDNS for dns level blocking.
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Kerbonut
2 hours ago
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I must be doing good because that site is broken for me. Null not/blocked and null total. (Ninja edit: Safari btw)
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drcongo
2 hours ago
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Safari with AdGuard and NextDNS here: 134 blocked, 1 not blocked. Ad blocking on Safari is just about perfect.
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rs_rs_rs_rs_rs
2 hours ago
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Yeah, Safari is on manifest v3 for some years now. Please that recomend it over Chrome for adblocking are clueless.
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concinds
1 hour ago
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Safari is much more limited than even manifest v3. Gorhill's mv3 extension, uBlock Lite, can't support Safari because Apple refuses to support half the web APIs necessary, despite constant requests and appeals, including directly by Gorhill to Safari's DevRel person.

Works fine for basic ads but more tracking goes through, which is silly.

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ceejayoz
2 hours ago
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Safari’s existence (in iOS, at least, for now) is what keeps Chrome from unilaterally determining the future of the web.
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concinds
1 hour ago
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ceejayoz
44 minutes ago
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No; your link immediately waters down its claims: “at least that's not the primary effect”.

It needn’t be primary to be important. If iOS didn’t enforce Safari, we’d see a lot more “only works in Chrome” signs on sites and “emerging standards” would be added to Chrome without much chance of Firefox keeping pace.

Apple’s motivations are hardly pure, but as a FF user I’m glad iOS has the market share it does.

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jacooper
2 hours ago
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Use brave, a browser that's actually private by default.
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husam212
2 hours ago
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Isn't it Chromium based?
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Unai
2 hours ago
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Yes, but they have vowed to maintain manifest V2 support, at least until it becomes unfeasible. It also comes with its own ad blocker.

Then again, Brave is an advertisement company, same as Google. And the CEO is Brendan Eich, notorious for two very evil and despicable things: being homophobic and creating JavaScript.

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axpvms
2 hours ago
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Every now and then I download Firefox and try to gaslight myself that it's actually a good browser now. It usually doesn't take long before I'm using a chromium based browser again.
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Kerbonut
2 hours ago
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Ok, I’ll bite. What is your experience like on Firefox? What things convince you back to Chromium?
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Unai
2 hours ago
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I'm not the person you asked, but I could have written the exact same comment. For me, SSB and chromium's much better profile functionality are the biggest hurdles when trying to move to Firefox or a Firefox-based browser.

I also encounter way too many bugs and weird behaviours in Firefox web dev tools. I hate chromium dev tools too, but I find it a more consistent bad experience.

The closest I've been to fully switching has been Zen browser. The ability to completely hide the browser's UI so you only see it when hovering is almost good enough to forget all other issues I got with Firefox. That "focus mode", vertical tabs, and side-panels, are the best UI elements to come to browsers since tabs, and I hope and expect all browsers copy them soon enough.

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downut
2 hours ago
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I want to thank you for your service. It is courageous and principled people like yourself that supplies enough eyeballs on chromium that incentivizes bigcorp adtech to keep things slightly less worse.
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mediumsmart
3 hours ago
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Fighting Google, what a good idea and great way to spend time hacking my life into pieces
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benreesman
2 hours ago
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Alphabet as globe-spanning empire of mediocrity is on the way out: it might take a year or a decade, but it’s too far along to reverse.

The hard-core of Google excellence will remain, by that name or another. It was called DEC (and Bell) before, and it will be called something in a decade.

These institutions have been so kind as to rebrand themselves when they went from excellent to awful: Google became Alphabet, Facebook became Meta, Twitter became X, OpenAI became, whatever they’re going to call the awful thing.

You fight back by waiting, and by voting for people who won’t fire Lina Khan.

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