24 ms·

uBlock Origin works best on Firefox

1595 points by anonymfus 6y ago

nimbius 6y ago
this process, also called cname flattening, is available in many dns recursors.
grenoire 6y ago
Honestly, I can't really browse on my phone anymore. I'm... spoiled by FF + uBlock and I can't tolerate all the distractions. Will we ever get enough traction on either blocking mechanisms or stop shoving ads everywhere? Will the general public experience the pleasures of an ad-less internet? P.S. I'm on an iPhone, blockers failed me so far. Thanks for the suggestions fellas.
- zaik 6y ago
  Firefox Mobile + uBlock works great for me.
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    It works pretty well but Edge/Chrome feel better than FF on mobile. Scrolling performance is probably the biggest difference. I've had issues with using FF as the default webview too.
    - kgwxd 6y ago
      Fells better even with all the ads and other annoyances uBO blocks? I've never noticed a scrolling performance issue myself, let alone one worth tolerating that stuff over.
    - mminer237 6y ago
      You can always use Brave. Not quite as good as uBO, but it still blocks most ads while being Chromium-based.
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      From my perspective, scrolling performance is a minor annoyance, whereas the inability to block ads is basically a complete showstopper.
- godelski 6y ago
  FF Mobile has uBlock
  - temp0826 6y ago
    Firefox on iOS does not support extensions, fwiw
    - benjohnson 6y ago
      As I understand it, it's Apples fault for requiring all browsers delivered by it's App Store to be basically wrappers around Safari.
      - throwaway09223 6y ago
        How has Apple not been strung up on antitrust grounds over this?
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        Because IOS is a small fraction of the smartphone and PC market.
        kaba0 6y ago
        It doesn’t preclude antitrust investigations.
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        I don't think it is in violation of existing law but I'm totally for addition protections like the ability of users to install software of their choosing on their own hardware including additional app stores.
    - thereare5lights 6y ago
      You can use Firefox Focus as the ad blocker for Safari on iOS
- jjbinx007 6y ago
  Blokada for Android is a pretty good DNS-based ad blocker.
  - bootlooped 6y ago
    Came here to say this same thing about NextDNS. Plus they'll block ads in apps, which uBlock Origin is not going to help you with. It seems like DNS ad blocking is a pretty good solution on mobile, with different pros and cons. I do also use uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile though.
  - leeoniya 6y ago
    or if you have root, AdAway can patch your hosts file.
  - Ayesh 6y ago
    Or, you can just set a DoT server that blocks ads by default.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    You can definitely do better than use Blokada: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536
- na85 6y ago
  Posting this from my oneplus running firefox and ublock origin. Firefox has been my daily driver on mobile for a few years now (since before Quantum) and it's been reliably great.
- rplnt 6y ago
  Anymore? I don't think browsing on a phone was ever viable. The problems changed over time, but I never found myself using the browser for anything other than absolute necessity. It's sad really. Back in the day Opera with Turbo (or whatever it was called) was the peak of mobile browser usability for me.
  - timbit42 6y ago
    FF+uBO works great on Android.
  - calvinmorrison 6y ago
    Firefox does support no script on mobile! It's great
  - deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- ub99 6y ago
  I use AdGuard pro on an iPhone and generally don’t see any ads at all in Safari. I believe this app will block ads in any iOS browser.
  - pcf 6y ago
    AFAIK, ads can only be blocked in Safari on iOS. I have Adguard on my iPhone, but it only works in Safari – not Firefox, which is the browser I use. So that's very annoying.
    - axlee 6y ago
      There are DNS blockers for iOS, which block most ads, including in-app ads. Just need to find the right list.
    - jonathanlydall 6y ago
      Edge browser on iOS has an option to make use of content blockers in the same way that Safari does. Last I checked Chrome doesn’t. I’m surprised to hear that Firefox doesn’t have the option to do so. I don’t know if it’s just muscle memory, but Safari on iOS is still my browser of choice due to the way you open and close tabs in it.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      Firefox has an additional app called Firefox Focus which installs a content blocker for both Safari and Firefox. Also for Safari, Magic Lasso AdBlocker does a very good job.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    I'd like to switch to iPhone, but the lack of real Firefox + uBO is what keeps me from doing it. It's good to know there are some options there, thanks for the pointer.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      If ad blocking is all you’re looking for, I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad in Safari iOS with Firefox focus content blocker, or Wipr content blocker. I don’t notice any difference between Firefox or Chrome + ublock origin and Safari + Wipr/Firefox Focus.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Well, I use FF+uBlock on my phone :) It works super well.
  - cmeacham98 6y ago
    They said they're on iOS, where you can only use WebKit, and therefore extensions like uBO are not possible.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Ah, that was edited in after I wrote my comment, sadly.
- crocsarecool 6y ago
  I can’t look up a recipe for boiled eggs without coming upon a 15 paragraph essay with ads in between each paragraph. It’s so obnoxious now. I don’t mind that people want to monetize, but it’s getting off putting when it is so obnoxious.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    The. Worst. I don’t care at all about any of this. Give me the time they boil for ffs. I don’t know if it’s sites paying by the word, or SEO, or some “value added” psychological trick. It is getting worse.
    - bbarnett 6y ago
      I bet they've noticed 'more time spent on the page' since they added interesting stories to those recipes! "When I was little, Grandma did this and that and blah blah blah". Of course, the time spent is cursing, and skimming and hunting to find useful info. No one is finding the story interesting, but it looks good on metrics? I wonder if the above is accurate or not.
    - jlund-molfese 6y ago
      I think the idea is that Google allegedly prioritizes pages by user dwell time, the idea being that if someone spends 10 minutes on your page, it's more relevant than another page where the user only spends 5 seconds before closing the tab. So forcing you to scroll through an essay on the complete history of nutmeg before you can see any of the ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie recipe may improve SEO
      - Semaphor 6y ago
        but every recipe site I've recently encountered, had a "jump to recipe" link right at the top
    - Kelamir 6y ago
      I use https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ for finding recipes, it has scraped over 2M of them. No distractions.
- dont__panic 6y ago
  I host my own VPN on a raspberry pi at home so I can use my pi.hole even when I'm off my home wifi network. Unfortunately that seems to be the most comprehensive solution I can find for iOS, and sadly Android phones are pretty much all too large for me.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  > Will the general public experience the pleasures of an ad-less internet? Remember how cable was supposed to replace ads on over the air tv? It was about minutes before it was all ads too. Streaming services are starting to get there but then the shows themselves are ads. And you have a scenario where Netflix and YouTube couldn’t exist in scenarios that didn’t rely on our bandwidth models and massive anti-competitive models. ... so IDKMAN... I don’t know how we get to an internet where people making things aren’t expecting to get paid for their submissions, especially now that we’ve jumped in there with both feet. I personally would pay for a no-bullshit internet, but it’s just cable tv’s promise all over again isn’t it? As great as something would start out, soon would come the influencers and the narrative pushers and the censorship and the “forum sliding” and the downvotes / echochambers / bubbles / power tripping moderation... I’m wondering if the solution isn’t just to give it all up and use the tools only when you need them. A cabin in the woods, but a spotty dialup connection for when you need to find something.
  - freebuju 6y ago
    > would pay for a no-bullshit internet The money is in selling you ads, on a revolving basis. Not in you ponying up a subscription fee to not see those ads. If it's not the ads, it's the usual FBI or whatever government surveillance program tracking you. You are right on the solution however. Some ads and tracking are so pervasive (e.g smart TVs) that the only truly effective way to mitigate against them is to cut down on or eliminate your exposure to these devices.
- Dobbs 6y ago
  I run NextDNS on my phone. It isn't perfect particularly because it is an all or nothing type thing which gets frustrating with URL redirects. But it is far better than not.
- isatty 6y ago
  On an iPhone? I was a noscript user from 10+ years ago (I guess?) and I’ve been using uBo for as long as I can remember but isn’t Firefox on iPhone just a wrapper? Is it battery efficient? As a workaround I use a Pi-Hole (except, not on a pi).
  - mcyukon 6y ago
    It is just a webkit wrapper. At least the last time I looked into it. UBlock Origin isn't possible. You can get some Apple sanctioned Ad-Blockers, but I think most (or all?) of them use a invisible VPN with DNS based ad blocking. Mozilla has Firefox Focus for iOS, it does Ad Blocking but it's main selling point is No Tracking, No history and No synced bookmarks either
  - xaos____ 6y ago
    Install Firefox focus, go to Safari settings, add Firefox focus as Content Blocker and Firefox ( Not Focus, the real one) will show no ads anymore. Works, because Firefox on iOS is mandated to use the Safari engine
    - mcyukon 6y ago
      Nice, never thought to try that. Makes sense though. Thanks!
      - xaos____ 6y ago
        You are welcome!
- nashashmi 6y ago
  I hear you. One of the greatest reasons I miss Firefox on android was because it allowed ublock.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Run pihole or a similar dns solution at the network level, and you can block domains without installing anything on your devices.
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    Host based blocking is certainly better than nothing, but uBlock offers much more comprehensive and expansive blocking, not to mention cosmetic filtering and other features that you can't achieve with PiHole/NextDNS/AdguardDNS/Blokada etc..
    - kube-system 6y ago
      For sure, it's not as powerful as something that can modify the DOM, etc. But, you can also run both, if you still prefer uBlock on your PC.
      - approxim8ion 6y ago
        Yup, I agree. Running both right now, the additional benefit of moving DNS queries away from my ISP (I pay for NextDNS) is certainly a good one too
      - computronus 6y ago
        I use both - uBO at the browser level and a PiHole for DNS. It's "defense in depth" - there's more than one layer of defense for something nefarious to get through.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  On iOS, Safari with a couple content blockers (like Purify and/or 1Blocker) do a pretty decent job. Once in a blue moon something will get through, but the goal of dramatically improving load times and decrudding pages is accomplished well enough for me. On Android, Firefox supports a subset of extensions that includes uBlock Origin. Chrome seems to be the dominant browser on Android but regardless of how good it is, I can't imagine not using Firefox there.
  - rattray 6y ago
    Firefox is my default browser on Android, and I use Chrome when I need to. It works fine. I personally tend to use Chrome for "logged-in" internet use, and Firefox for "logged-out" use like browsing, news, etc. True on both desktop and mobile. Partly this is because Google's password vault has great UX across Chrome and Android apps.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  If you have android you can FF + Ublock on android. Sadly ios devices don't seem to have that option.
- therealmarv 6y ago
  Using Adguard on Android for some years. It works really good with Chrome and all other apps. Mobile browsing without any adblocker is a very bad experience.
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  If Mozilla can continue honing their mobile browsing team and keep alive a mobile web browser with pre-Manifest v3 WebExtension support, then maybe the status quo doesn't have to change. Advertisers can push whatever they want and the 0.1% of users that want to use uBlock can happily block them all. As far as the current landscape of adblocking goes, I have no real complaints. If people try to encourage too much radical change with how ads are distributed, I fear that the advertising agencies will panic and all start to do what YouTube does, which is to serve the ads from the same domain as the content, rendering all domain-based adblocking useless. At that point, the only thing between the general Internet and ads will be uBlock, and if Google obtains complete control of the WebExtension standards, I'm not sure there would be anything else we could do.
- fsflover 6y ago
  Firefox with uBlock works fine on my Pinephone ;)
- bobiny 6y ago
  I’m using this on iOS https://better.fyi/ https://better.fyi/ I don’t remember last time I saw ads.
- Svperstar 6y ago
  >spoiled by FF+uBlock and I can't tolerate all the distractions. I run FF+uBlock on my S21 Ultra. Works just like the desktop.
  - sedatk 6y ago
    Not possible with an iPhone, I presume.
- blub 6y ago
  Give Brave a try on iOS. Besides offering ad blocking, it can block all JS (unfortunately just an on/off toggle, no subdomain specific settings) and this takes care of most annoyances like cookie pop-ups, article count limiters, ads, etc. On the other hand, mobile websites tend to break more often without JS compared to desktop websites.
- mtone 6y ago
  My iPad Air 1 is aging, slow, and I loved it but I simply won't replace a machine where a publicly-funded news/docs store app in particular gets laden with unskippable ads. Half a thousand bucks for this frustration, no thanks! No amount of content/entertainment is worth this.
- jamesgeck0 6y ago
  On iPhone you have Safari content blockers. Better Blocker and Firefox Focus are two popular ones. There's also a Lockdown, an open source firewall implemented using iOS VPN capabilities (though it doesn't send your requests through an external server). Lockdown is able to block trackers in any app, not just Safari.
- christophilus 6y ago
  Brave on iOS is great. So is the DDG browser.
- pacifika 6y ago
  Firefox focus includes a decent safari content blocker
- pouta 6y ago
  Insight Browser. No affiliation, just a very very happy user.
- asiachick 6y ago
  You can push to force Apple to allow other browser engines. Firefox on Android supports extensions including uBlock Origin. Firefox on iOS is only allowed to be skinned Safari https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
- zargon 6y ago
  This is one of the top reasons I can't buy an iPhone.
- RGamma 6y ago
  I have good results with AdGuard on iPhone (functions as content blocker in Safari). It's not perfect and difficult to customize but works well for the most part. It even gets rid of YT video ads (mostly anyway) I also combine it with NextDNS
sackofmugs 6y ago
This is honestly one of the first time I'm convinced in a technical sense to consider Firefox over Chrome. uBlock Origin feels as core to me to web browsing as Saved Passwords and Incognito Mode. That uBlock Origin can work better is like the browser itself being better.
- bilekas 6y ago
  Firefox does seem to have really improved over the last few iterations, performance also when large numbers of tabs open. I cant find the link right now, but there was a nice timings done where Chrome was using less CPU at lower tab counts, but when it increased count, the CPU utilization was considerably higher than FF. I'll be giving it a fair shake for a few months.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Firefox recently rolled out an update that broke up the big GC passes into small GC passes. That contributed to a huge improvement in responsiveness.
    - bilekas 6y ago
      That might have been related to what I was reading, it looked impressive anyway, I did mean to go check out FF then, I guess now is the time !
    - sfink 6y ago
      That sounds great. But as someone who works on the Firefox GC team, I gotta say: what? Or more specifically, I'm wondering what change you could be referring to. We've had incremental GC for many years now, which does exactly what you describe. It's true that we keep splitting up more of the uninterruptible pieces into smaller chunks, but I don't recall any major change there recently. (I'm not very good at marketing, am I?) And according to telemetry, the incremental slices have been working quite well for most people, at least within the last dozen releases or so. We have a budget, and it's rare that we go over it. Not that I fully trust telemetry; if you have counterexamples please file a bug. (I'd love to have a nice set of scenarios that are problematic for the GC. Our telemetry errs strongly on the side of privacy, as it should, so I can't get URLs automatically.)
staticassertion 6y ago
Sucks, but I'm pretty locked into Chrome. I use GSuite for management, ChromeOS, etc. Maybe it means that uBlock Origin can't protect me as well, but it's pretty hard for me to give up the benefits from all of those other things. I don't see Firefox competing. Mozilla doesn't seem to believe that monetizing a browser is possible, whereas I pay thousands of dollars a year at my company because of Chrome's integrations with these other systems. Until Firefox can compete like that, and maybe they just can't, I can't switch.
- asdff 6y ago
  why not use g suite on firefox? g suite works fine for me.
  - entropicdrifter 6y ago
    Yeah, I use G-Suite on FF (with UBO, of course) every single day for work and personal use and have never had a single issue.
- eikenberry 6y ago
  What situation (job or whatever) has led to such vendor lock-in? Maybe if you gave more details others could avoid your situation.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    I think they mean they manage a Google Workplace (formerly G Suite) org themselves, given: > I use GSuite for management Using FF would break existing MDM/DLP policies that they themselves have set up.
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    Just to give clarification: a) We're a small tech startup. We use Chromebooks exclusively because it makes corpops/corpsec and compliance trivial. b) Why not Firefox? Maybe Firefox could work, but I'm not sure - with GSuite we can manage Chrome extensions via policy, we can manage Chrome versions, Context Aware Access, etc.
antattack 6y ago
I would use Firefox + uBlock Origin over other browsers even if it was half as fast.
- ballballball 6y ago
  Preach.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  You'd loose all that performance gain to ads anyway. I'm truly shocked how horrible the experience is whenever I see someone browsing the web without it.
  - errantspark 6y ago
    It's absolutely wild, I have Chrome Canary installed w/o any addons because of some bleeding edge WebBluetooth stuff I'm working on and occasionally I'll forget which browser I'm using and visit a site with it. The web without adblock is basically unusable, it's legitimately completely insane that people will put up with it.
    - AviationAtom 6y ago
      They garbage it up more under the pretenses that too many people are blocking, denying them ad revenue. If they made it less obnoxious then less people would feel the need to block ads. The worst ones for me are the fake virus ads that basically hijack my browser. If you can't keep those out of your ad ecosystem then I'm forced to block it all.
    - freebuju 6y ago
      People don't put up with ads. They are forced upon them. Many of them with no knowledge of how to block them. To them, ads are part and parcel of "using the internet". Some of them hate ads. But not for technical reasons though. Outside of complaining why they hate that annoying ad from company X, most people probably won't be motivated enough to actually do anything about it. For some, this is just how they expect the "internet" to work. An ad-free one would feel broken to them. Ads are not a bother for most casual people.
clircle 6y ago
This is technical and interesting, but can anyone tell the difference between web browsing with FF/uBo and Chrome/uBo? I personally cannot, other than that the fonts render a bit differently. Webpages load fast and no ads get through in both cases.
- timbit42 6y ago
  The first chart in the article explains the difference. It's not so much about being able to tell the difference, but how much it is protecting you in the background.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    To be fair the only difference there seems to be from a future RC release of uBO that isn't even out yet, and also that has to do more with third-party tracking cookies more so than ad-blocking, so most users probably wouldn't notice it. It's not about speed, it's about the probability of detecting these CNAME cloaked tracking.
- davidgerard 6y ago
  Google searches on Chromium load the page, then insert three or four ad links before the first result about a second later. Ridiculously annoying, as I'm used to clicking quickly on the desired result.
podiki 6y ago
I can't live without uBlock Origin and uMatrix, and was sad to see uMatrix archived [0]. Still works great, but I'm wondering what will happen long term. Anyone also use both and since drop uMatrix for something else, or just uBlock? How is it? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973
- donatzsky 6y ago
  As I remember it, you really shouldn't be using both at the same time. Don't remember why, only that it's a bad idea. And you can set up uBlock to do most of what uMatrix does anyway.
  - Valmar 6y ago
    It's because there was some overlap in their functionality. What I did was disable the overlapping functionality in uBlock Origin, and let uMatrix handle the rest.
- freedomben 6y ago
  uMatrix is so fundamental to my web experience, I dread the day it stops working.
- caoilte 6y ago
  It's been really interesting to watch recent gorhill tweets where he describes some laboured efforts to type in rules to block content in ublock that you can do in umatrix with the click of a button. I don't understand it, but I agree that unlock+umatrix on desktop and mobile has been the best thing about browsing for years. I think maybe he wants to consolidate Dev effort and I completely understand. He's probably the only person I'm patriotic about right now.
- callesgg 6y ago
  So do you have it installed in your pacemaker or something...?
- coldpie 6y ago
  FWIW, I use uBO together with NoScript, on both desktop and on mobile (Android). I've never used uMatrix, and I've been told by others that it was a superior experience, but if you want a combination that is still being supported, I can recommend this combo.
bassdropvroom 6y ago
> The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store. Anyone know what this extra permission is and why requesting this extra permission would cause friction?
- 10000truths 6y ago
  My guess is that it’s much harder to review WASM bytecode to make sure it doesn’t do anything sketchy.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    Surely the ublock devs are not writing WASM directly? It would be possible to have the source code available for audit with some way of proving it generates the assembly that is being shipped.
    - tmp538394722 6y ago
      Sorry anything is possible, but your comment is a bit hand wavy. Reproducible builds are non trivial. And then what - the reviewer is now supposed to build your software and verify some Hash? Or were you thinking something else?
      - wnevets 6y ago
        >And then what - the reviewer is now supposed to build your software I believe that is standard operating procedure for the chrome store.
      - seba_dos1 6y ago
        > Reproducible builds are non trivial. That's true, but they aren't rocket science either. It's perfectly reasonable to require them for browser extensions.
  - 6y ago
throw0101a 6y ago
Can someone ELI5 the pros and cons of using uBlock Origin and/or uMatrix? Should I be using one, either, both? Are they competitors or complementary? What does each do best?
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  uMatrix is unmaintained and most of its functionality is supposed to be available in uBlock Origin in advanced mode.
- DannyB2 6y ago
  uMatrix provides fine grained control in a matrix by domain names (rows) vs various permissions to grant (columns). Example: Allow domain foo.com to run scripts, but domain bar.com cannot run script, no cookies, but css and images are okay.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  If you're on a Mac, using Firefox with uBlock Origin is a realy nice experience: - no ads on Youtube - I prefer the Firefox dev tools over Chrome for vanilla-js. FYI: I'm one of the earliest and longest-term users of Firefox, starting at Netscape in 2000. Never had a reason to switch.
xoa 6y ago
Wow, what an awesome dive into some of the technical aspects behind one of my favorite tools for using the web. And I do think of it that way these days, it's fairly stunning on some sites to switch off all the block and see how they become genuinely unbrowsable. I remember seeing Gorhill discuss a few times over the years some of the reqs for uBO during certain times (like why it could no longer work with Safari following changes Apple made a while back), but so cool to have it all collected in one place. Having said that I've also been fairly stunned recently to see how much difference a simple DNS blacklist system can make too. Not because it's a big technical achievement but because it isn't and in principle seems relatively trivial to work around. But as I've been switching all my routing from UniFi to OPNsense, I've gone ahead and tried out Unbound's basic built-in blacklisting. While it's no uBO, it works on every single device and browser including in apps and it seems like it really shouldn't, that more parties would just be proxying ads through their own infra and DNS. Been kind of an interesting illustration of technical vs economic influences in an ecosystem. I can see how proxying would add complexity and cost to setup so it must just be that few enough people do it the ad industry can't be bothered. But should that ever catch on (and it could, Raspberry Pi seems fairly well known) I expect uBO to be able to keep up with the cat-and-mouse long after DNS has been left behind. This piece helps underline how incredibly important maintaining a critical level of diversity in the browser ecosystem is. Just shortly ago there were a bunch of complaints again about Apple not allowing Chrome to be on iOS because it "holds back the web", but what "holding back the web" looks like is certainly a matter of perspective...
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  I guess the issue with proxying is that the ad provider has less control/data and can't be sure whether views are genuine.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    That’s great if you’re right, because it means it is a fundamental limitation that can’t easily be worked around.
    - 6y ago
pharmakom 6y ago
I love Firefox and I use it on principle. I don’t think I have a worse web experience, although that wouldn’t stop me. What does break websites is turning on anti-tracking measures. The number of times a site won’t work till I enable third party cookies shows the sad state of the web. Developers, do you only test in Chrome on Windows with default settings or something?
- skizm 6y ago
  "Whatever gets my jira from the left side of the board to the right side of the board."
- l3_ 6y ago
  the tab containers are amazing
- noahtallen 6y ago
  > The number of times a site won’t work till I enable third party cookies shows the sad state of the web. Developers, do you only test in Chrome on Windows with default settings or something? Well, Chrome is removing 3rd-party cookies by next year, and they are disabled by default in Safari already (well, sort of, ITP is weird). So many problems which used to happen to very few users are now being quickly prioritized. There are lots of use cases for third party cookies (example: you have a centralized management platform for lots of websites which have unique mapped domains, and you want to be authenticated against all of them at once), so it’s not surprising that critical features can be broken. It’s very much backwards incompatible. But I agree, overall removing 3rd party cookies is great. Though, it’s important that whatever advertisers think of next isn’t just as bad.
- toastal 6y ago
  I've hated my experience with resistFingerprinting enabled. I can't get dark themes, my clock and times are always wrong, you're locked to en-US, no WebGL, etc.; basically any feature that could make the web nicer and have content tailored for be is now weaponized for fingerprinting. I've recently switched off fingerprint resistance and moved to a script blocker as the sites I do trust do offer a nicer experience I've been missing out on.
egberts1 6y ago
Latest Firefox really does a good job supporting MULTIPLE video frames. - Something that I have yet to see on Chrome.
pjfin123 6y ago
Great write up! I hope Brave can improve on this.
- yepguy 6y ago
  I doubt Brave will do anything about it, because ad blocking in Brave is built-in and implemented without the extension APIs. https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
- blub 6y ago
  Brave is doing something similar: https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/
apozem 6y ago
I really, really wish Apple would update Safari for uBlock Origin. I’m about to publish a Safari extension (a NoScript equivalent) and the content blocking APIs are so limited. iOS is even worse than the Mac, too. On iOS AFAIK you can’t even reload the page for the user.
- sjwright 6y ago
  > you can’t even reload the page for the user Can you explain why you'd want to do this? At first blush it seems like a terrible idea to allow extensions to reload pages.
  - DamnInteresting 6y ago
    I created an extension that flushes all cookies and local storage for the current domain; it then reloads the page so you appear to be a fresh new visitor.
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      Name?
      - DamnInteresting 6y ago
        It's called "Howdy Stranger", it's listed in both Firefox and Chrome official add-on stores.
        carlhjerpe 6y ago
        You just got yourself an install. The VMware partner portal is so buggy i need to do temporary containers all the time, but this is nice. Thanks mate!
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    On the ublock origin UI you can click a little icon in the toolbar pull up the settings for that page. There is a little icon you that shows you whether it is enabled or disabled both in the toolbar and in this settings page. Clicking it in the settings page toggles the state for that page which is retained next time you visit. When you change the state a little refresh icon appears right behind the status icon indicating that the state of the page as shown doesn't match your setting. Clicking it reloads the page. You could reload it automatically at state change but this might break whatever the user is in the middle of doing. You don't have to have this feature but it is handy that the reminder that the page is out of sync is a button to fix this and that it is half an inch from your current mouse position.
nwmcsween 6y ago
Just reinstalled Firefox due to this info
- mentos 6y ago
  Yea not sure if anyone on the Firefox team is reading but I have not had any reason to consider Firefox until reading this thread. If Firefox made their browser the best at ad-blocking instead of performance (which also might go hand in hand) I would consider using it again.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    I’m fairly sure they have made their browser the best at ad-blocking already. But due to human nature, negatives like daring to remove some feature with minuscule usage gets heavily upvoted.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Is Firefox worse than Chrome in anyway? Performance seems on par and it has a truly transformative app that iirc is unavailable in chrome: treetabs.
    - tfehring 6y ago
      >Is Firefox worse than Chrome in anyway? IME Firefox is much more of a battery hog on MacOS, Chrome's history page is much better, and some sites (Glassdoor and Google Meet come to mind) don't work properly in Firefox. And I don't really use the developer tools in either but I've generally heard that Chrome's are better. I still use Firefox as my daily driver but it's not flawless.
      - depressedpanda 6y ago
        I don't use Glassdoor, but Google Meet works fine in Firefox, at least as far as I can tell. What issues are you experiencing? The dev tools in Firefox are better for working with CSS [1], about as good for everything else. I only resort to Chromium when working with PWAs. [1]: https://youtu.be/a-V8GFtwjos https://youtu.be/a-V8GFtwjos
BigGreenTurtle 6y ago
uBlock Origin helped me get a vaccine appointment despite the scheduling system's attempt to make it as hard as possible. Thanks!
sandeepbhat 6y ago
Really nice post!! I almost got confused with uBlox at the start. https://www.u-blox.com/en https://www.u-blox.com/en
blub 6y ago
I started using Brave in addition to Firefox recently and I was curious if it supports this. Seems like it does (https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/) and uBlock origin was the inspiration for that feature. I never used uBlock, but I did use uMatrix (discontinued, but still working) which allows you very fine grained control over scripts and other resources based on the domain. Unfortunately it was a pain to get some things to work with that, especially online payments which use many subdomains and redirects. Paying for anything online was a game of enabling 10 domains on average, reloading the website, re-inputting payment info, etc. Some websites (like twitter) simply didn't work even if one enabled all the domains which appeared in the matrix. Brave is pretty decent at blocking JS. Not as fine grained as uMatrix, and it apparently doesn't remember that you enabled things (at least in private browsing). I think it doesn't perform what uBlock calls HTML filtering, because it still makes requests to websites which were completely neutered by uMatrix. All in all it's more pleasant to surf using Brave than Firefox, because fewer websites are broken by the blocking. I wasn't pleased with Safari's native tracking protection + a simple Safari blocking extension which only looks at URLs. Websites work the best, but it's making requests to many unwanted domains still. Maybe it's blocking cookies and scripts, no idea, but I'm not happy even with the simple requests for resources going through.
- surround 6y ago
  Brave is Chromium-based and suffers from all of the limitations stated in the parent article. (Except for CNAME cloaking. However, their CNAME uncloaking only applies to their built-in tracking protection. AFAIK, if you use uBo on Brave it will be still unable to uncloak CNAMES.)
  - blub 6y ago
    While uBlock inside Brave suffers from the same limitations as uBlock within Chrome, the more interesting question is if Brave's native blocking makes that irrelevant or not. Brave does have a few intriguing privacy features, like plugging WebRTC IP leaks while still allowing use of WebRTC (Firefox is off or on while Safari's always on AFAIK), so that's not excluded. The main problem with Brave is that they're building on a browser which is designed to leak privacy like a sieve. It seems that they're being careful and monitoring all the anti-features Google's adding, but who knows.
OJFord 6y ago
Such a shame uMatrix was discontinued. uBlock Origin comes close, and surpasses in some ways (I used both for that reason) but lacks separate control of cookies, images, scripts, etc. So you can't accept a particular third party's images without also accepting its scripts, cookies, etc. I mention it mainly in the hope that we can popularise its maintained fork 'nuTensor'. After trying uBlock (as in attempting to also cover what I used to use uMatrix for) for a few weeks I think it's insufficient and nuTensor is the better option for me, but it quickly won't be if ~nobody uses it and it falls by the wayside. Alternatively uBO could support the few details it lacks from uM? It seems like the problem basically was difficulty/time constraints in supporting both.. but I don't know why they were ever separate? There's plenty of overlap. If uBO had uM's granularity in 'advanced mode', that'd be perfect.
- Demiurge 6y ago
  I agree it's a shame, and I hope there is a legit replacement. However, it continues to work for me, so far, without issues.
- birksherty 6y ago
  I find ublock much more granular than umatrix. It can block all js and allow a particular one, block just a segment of inline scripts. It can block separately a single script, image or any other request. I find it much better than umatrix which can't do many things that ublock does. If someone wantd to they can just install it and forget it also. Much more versatile.
- gxnxcxcx 6y ago
  > So you can't accept a particular third party's images without also accepting its scripts, cookies, etc. It's a clunky interface with poor discoverability, but with the uBO logger open in a browser tab you can click on any request right beside the timestamp and define a new rule with the desired granularity. In the URL Rule tab, the unmarked left column sets the allow/noop/block behavior. Edit: Found the wiki page: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger#creating-filters https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger#creating-f...
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Sephr 6y ago
> The Firefox version of uBO use LZ4 compression by default to store raw filter lists, compiled list data, and memory snapshots to disk storage. This doesn't explain why the Chrome version doesn't use LZ4 or better by default. There are native JS implementations of LZ4 available as well that don't require WebAssembly.
franklyt 6y ago
I should note that, on iOS, it seems that Safari with a content blocker outperforms the brave skin by a little, which outperforms the Firefox skin by a lot, which outperforms the chrome skin by a lot.
- smoldesu 6y ago
  What a brilliant and unexpected turnout.
FridgeSeal 6y ago
> Chromium-based browsers give precedence to websites over user settings when it comes to decide whether pre-fetching is disabled or not. Classic google/chrome “Yeah I know you’ve got these setting, but I’m just going to ignore them because this website wants to do it”.
Groxx 6y ago
>At browser launch, Firefox will wait for uBO to be up and ready before network requests are fired from already opened tab(s). >This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers, i.e. tracker/advertisement payloads may find their way into already opened tabs before uBO is up and ready in Chromium-based browsers, while these are properly filtered in Firefox. >Reliably blocking at browser launch is especially important for whoever uses default-deny mode for 3rd-party resources and/or JavaScript. Oof. TIL. That makes blockers kinda crippled in chromes, if you expect them to actually block things.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Google has an obvious incentive to make life hard for ad blocking extension developers. Chrome and chromium exist because their business model is showing ads in it. That's the only reason it exists. Everything else it does is there only to convince users to use it and thus get exposed to ads and tracking. That includes performance work, UX work, etc. that Google puts a lot of time and money in. It makes Chrome really nice to use. Mozilla and Firefox exists because it's developers wanted to create the best browser possible. That's why it had extensions before Chrome was even a thing and that's why ad blocking extensions exist almost as long as extensions have been a thing. Adblock emerged somewhere around 2002 which was very soon after the first OSS releases by Mozilla reached the 1.0 stage. Also Phoenix, Firefox' ancestor became a thing around that time. Tabs and extensions were some of the early things that made that popular. Ad blocking always was the #1 use case for extensions. Ironically, that's why Chrome has extensions. The only reason it supports extensions is that not having that would have made it impossible to grab market share from Firefox (and Internet Explorer). Having support for both extensions and ad blocking were a hard requirement for Google despite its business model. But now that it is the dominant browser, that feature is no longer as important as it once was. So, Google has been slowly making it harder for extensions to interfere with their ads and tracking. They can't make it too hard or their market share will evaporate. But they don't have to be particularly good at it. And now that they have Android, they don't have to worry as much about losing market share. Android exists for the exact same reason. Chrome is losing relevance as a revenue stream as users consume more content on Android via "native" apps running in a virtual machine compiled against mandatory proprietary ad & tracking technology.
Black101 6y ago
I have v1.34.0 ... is that RC1? But either way, I take this wonderful tool for granted since I have been using it forever (and its predecessors).
miralize 6y ago
I'd love to move to Firefox, but I havent committed to fully because the Profiles and the corresponding switching mechanism in Chrome is just too good. I don't want to use containers to manage the different work/personal profiles I have and the lack of easy way to toggle between the two (a keyboard shortcut) has been a deal-breaker every time I tried to switch. The profile manager in Firefox is long overdue a revamp.
- theon144 6y ago
  Honest question, in what ways is switching entire profiles better than containers?
ck2 6y ago
It even works well on firefox android which is arguably more important though I am not sure about that products future after the complete rewrite.
perryizgr8 6y ago
> Pre-fetching, which is disabled by default in uBO, is reliably prevented in Firefox, while this is not the case in Chromium-based browsers. I really wish ubo wouldn't disable pre fetching. It has nothing to do with blocking ads. It just slows down the browser.
vietvu 6y ago
Wait, you guys are using other browser than Firefox?
- scaladev 6y ago
  I see lots of comments here assuming absolutely everybody uses Chromium-based browsers. The Firefox "cult" (which I have been a part of since 1.5) is a bubble inside a bubble.
mastrsushi 6y ago
www works best with Chromium-based browsers
lenova 6y ago
Slightly off-topic, but it was Firefox's Total Cookie Protection recently that finally got to me to switch from Chrome as my daily driver. Don't get me wrong, I miss Chrome as it just felt like a_smoother_ user experience, and I fear for Firefox replaying Opera's history given that the rest of the industry has standardized on Chromium... but I love how pro-privacy Firefox is.
- prox 6y ago
  I always have the opposite idea, Chrome is a total mess for me when it comes to UX. Probably just what you are used to first.
  - wojcikstefan 6y ago
    I disagree. I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser for at least 3 years now and still, whenever I have to fire up Chrome for some reason, my first impression is “ahh, this is sadly still so much smoother.”
    - hansel_der 6y ago
      i disagree. imo peak browser-ux was around 2005 with the original opera. pre-quantum firefox was ok-ish but already part of the decline.
bosswipe 6y ago
From the beginning Firefox's advantage was that it was a platform for extensions. Crowdsourcing features that later became standard, such as ad blocking and web debugging. It's mind-blowing to me that Mozilla has been on a quest to kill extensions and customization in the name of simplicity and supposed security. They will never be able to beat the wealthiest companies in human history that way.
cybert00th 6y ago
I truly hope gorhill is able to continue offering his services to the wider Internet community for a long time still to come. Our children have grown up on a, largely, ad-free Internet; and it's all thanks to people like him.
danShumway 6y ago
I made this prediction a little over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21506330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21506330 > after one year of Manifest V3 actually shipping to users in mainline Chrome: > - Assuming that Manifest V3's declarative API is not significantly changed from its current implementation. > - If you visit each of the top 10 publishers in the US (including open publishing platforms like Twitter/Facebook/Youtube) [...] > - Firefox will block more web trackers (65% likelyhood). > - Firefox will block more visible ads and popups (55% likelyhood). It's debatable whether or not the December rollout of Manifest V3 "counts" because Manifest V2 is still going to be available for about a year, but it's also increasingly looking like it won't matter -- the prediction might end up being proven right regardless of whether or not Manifest V2 is removed. I would probably raise these likelihoods if I were to revisit the prediction today. I think it's reasonably unlikely that CNAME masking is going to go down in popularity, and I think it's reasonably unlikely that Chrome is going to put in the effort to catch back up. The one thing that gives me pause is that the original prediction specified looking at the top 10 publishers, and I'm not sure if any of them are using CNAME masking yet.
Scottn1 6y ago
I've been a daily user and advocate of Firefox since Opera changed to using Chromium. But recently I've grown tired of their privacy hypocrisy and company decisions that I've uninstalled it and started to try out Edge/Brave/Vivaldi as my daily. It has pained me to do this as FF was my last safe haven away from Chromium. If you dig into some settings and follow tech news, I have begun to question some of Mozilla's controversial settings, deals with 3rd parties and their political blog posts. I also have a problem with the CEO making $3m per year yet a continued market share decline since she came on. Just a few of the things off the top of my head that I feel betray my trust of Firefox (all of these pertain to default Windows install): 1) Enabled by default all of your website DNS requests going to Cloudflare with a "promise" this information is not being used or sold. We all know how solid this promise has been for other large tech companies. All under the promotion that DoH protects you from your own ISP. 2) Upon install, FF installs a scheduled service that runs daily. From what I've found out, that service is sending back to Mozilla what your default browser is on YOUR PC (why is that their business). This scheduled service remains on your PC even after uninstalling Firefox and continues to run daily. 3) Enabled by default are Browser Studies and testing a clean install one is already installed and active called "F100 Snippets". Studies allow the Firefox team to install stuff right to your browser whenever they want, to gather telemetry . 4) "Recommended extensions" enabled by default. Got a nag for a recommended extension after few days of browsing. So FF must be scanning your browsing history in order for this to work? 5) this result: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traffic-results/ https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... . While it was from 2019 so needs to be updated, but upon first-run I was shocked at the results for FF here. 6) Firefox on Android has a known tracker embedded and enabled by default called Leanplum. From Mozilla's own website they state "Leanplum is a mobile marketing vendor" I'd love to support and use FF solely again, but I think they need some serious shaking up, starting with a new CEO (who allows this stuff).
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Yeah that's all true maybe but the other vendors are far worse AFAIK.
  - 6y ago
Synaesthesia 6y ago
One of the reasons I still like Firefox for Android is uBlock Origin, as well as a few other extensions.
dash2 6y ago
Tools like this are cutting off the branch they are sitting on. If you block all the ads on an ad-supported website, how will it survive?
- socceroos 6y ago
  Adapt? That's what most industries that face change do. How did sites survive before the ad infestation business model?
  - dash2 6y ago
    Could you be more specific, and say what strategies an ad-supported site might use to provide the same content?
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  The branch that uBlock sits on is not ad revenue. It's people's annoyance at constantly being subjected to intrusive user tracking, especially for sites that they have little choice to not use. Think social networks and banks. Sure you can refuse to use them entirely on principle, but it's not a practical approach if you want to actually have a life. On top of that, much of the tracking that does go on is actually blatantly illegal in how it's done, at least in the EU. It's just too small-time to enforce at scale. Doesn't mean I have to take this as a given.
  - dash2 6y ago
    I agree that tracking and ads are different. But uBlock does include ad-blocking functionality. The discussion here suggests that most people use it for that.
- sellyme 6y ago
  > If you block all the ads on an ad-supported website, how will it survive? If the only thing that website provides of value is a billboard, it doesn't deserve to. I'm perfectly happy paying for high-quality ad-free services.
korginator 6y ago
Long-time monthly donor to Firefox here, and have been a Mozilla / Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox user for a couple of decades now. I still think their principles are worth supporting but I'm starting to question their choice of priorities. IMHO they seem to be losing focus on their technical strengths - making a browser their audience wants to use. Over the past year I'm seeing a lot more problems with addons, specially on Linux. Several popular addons like umatrix and ublock origin make the UX sluggish, interacting with the addons UX are hit and miss, and such operations are often unresponsive for me. I'm seeing this on Ubuntu, PopOS and Mint. Mac and windows variants work reasonably well for me, but it's come to a point where I've reluctantly switched to Vivaldi for day to day personal use. My thanks and appreciation for Raymond Hill's excellent work. Though the technical aspects favor Firefox in theory, the extension / addon works far better with Chromium based browsers in practice for me.
f6v 6y ago
I had to resort to using Firefox with uBlock to watch YouTube. I can’t make it work on Safari with ad blockers, which is a shame.
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diragon 6y ago
I have difficulties understanding why everyone's using Chrome-based browsers, when it's obvious how bad they are for privacy.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  Many people do not really care about privacy or are not convinced that Firefox is significantly better.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    > Firefox is significantly better Most people use browsers for facebook, gmail, youtube, and things like banking, taxes, etc. It's common that, when facing any issue when using Firefox - with banking and government sites, you are going to be told to try using chrome. So, for the end user, chrome is the better browser, as more sites work properly on it.
    - depressedpanda 6y ago
      People keep saying that web sites don't work in Firefox, but it's never happened to me. Why is that?
      - matkoniecz 6y ago
        You likely look at different sites, like HN that is well designed rather that a decoration around ad delivery mechanism.
- deleted 6y ago
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- rchaud 6y ago
  Chrome is a product of one of the biggest corporations in the world and marketed and distributed as such. Firefox was big between 2004-2010 if I recall. Chrome came out in 2008, and needed a couple of a years to really dominate mindshare. The growth of Android helped as well.
ilovepitchdecks 6y ago
uBlock Origin has been my favorite browser extension for years (it's in fact the only one I have installed). These days I only use it for YouTube however. The best way to avoid ads is not to visit sites that have them.
prvc 6y ago
Would love to see benchmarks of Firefox vs Chrome, both with their respective versions of uBO.
mbrodersen 6y ago
Things I actually care about that does not work best on Firefox: 1. Scrolling. 2. Save to PDF.

1595 points by anonymfus 6y ago

this process, also called cname flattening, is available in many dns recursors.

Honestly, I can't really browse on my phone anymore. I'm... spoiled by FF + uBlock and I can't tolerate all the distractions. Will we ever get enough traction on either blocking mechanisms or stop shoving ads everywhere? Will the general public experience the pleasures of an ad-less internet? P.S. I'm on an iPhone, blockers failed me so far. Thanks for the suggestions fellas.

zaik 6y ago
Firefox Mobile + uBlock works great for me.
- bentcorner 6y ago
  It works pretty well but Edge/Chrome feel better than FF on mobile. Scrolling performance is probably the biggest difference. I've had issues with using FF as the default webview too.
  - kgwxd 6y ago
    Fells better even with all the ads and other annoyances uBO blocks? I've never noticed a scrolling performance issue myself, let alone one worth tolerating that stuff over.
  - mminer237 6y ago
    You can always use Brave. Not quite as good as uBO, but it still blocks most ads while being Chromium-based.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    From my perspective, scrolling performance is a minor annoyance, whereas the inability to block ads is basically a complete showstopper.
godelski 6y ago
FF Mobile has uBlock
- temp0826 6y ago
  Firefox on iOS does not support extensions, fwiw
  - benjohnson 6y ago
    As I understand it, it's Apples fault for requiring all browsers delivered by it's App Store to be basically wrappers around Safari.
    - throwaway09223 6y ago
      How has Apple not been strung up on antitrust grounds over this?
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        Because IOS is a small fraction of the smartphone and PC market.
        kaba0 6y ago
        It doesn’t preclude antitrust investigations.
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        I don't think it is in violation of existing law but I'm totally for addition protections like the ability of users to install software of their choosing on their own hardware including additional app stores.
  - thereare5lights 6y ago
    You can use Firefox Focus as the ad blocker for Safari on iOS
jjbinx007 6y ago
Blokada for Android is a pretty good DNS-based ad blocker.
- bootlooped 6y ago
  Came here to say this same thing about NextDNS. Plus they'll block ads in apps, which uBlock Origin is not going to help you with. It seems like DNS ad blocking is a pretty good solution on mobile, with different pros and cons. I do also use uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile though.
- leeoniya 6y ago
  or if you have root, AdAway can patch your hosts file.
- Ayesh 6y ago
  Or, you can just set a DoT server that blocks ads by default.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  You can definitely do better than use Blokada: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536
na85 6y ago
Posting this from my oneplus running firefox and ublock origin. Firefox has been my daily driver on mobile for a few years now (since before Quantum) and it's been reliably great.
rplnt 6y ago
Anymore? I don't think browsing on a phone was ever viable. The problems changed over time, but I never found myself using the browser for anything other than absolute necessity. It's sad really. Back in the day Opera with Turbo (or whatever it was called) was the peak of mobile browser usability for me.
- timbit42 6y ago
  FF+uBO works great on Android.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  Firefox does support no script on mobile! It's great
- deleted 6y ago
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ub99 6y ago
I use AdGuard pro on an iPhone and generally don’t see any ads at all in Safari. I believe this app will block ads in any iOS browser.
- pcf 6y ago
  AFAIK, ads can only be blocked in Safari on iOS. I have Adguard on my iPhone, but it only works in Safari – not Firefox, which is the browser I use. So that's very annoying.
  - axlee 6y ago
    There are DNS blockers for iOS, which block most ads, including in-app ads. Just need to find the right list.
  - jonathanlydall 6y ago
    Edge browser on iOS has an option to make use of content blockers in the same way that Safari does. Last I checked Chrome doesn’t. I’m surprised to hear that Firefox doesn’t have the option to do so. I don’t know if it’s just muscle memory, but Safari on iOS is still my browser of choice due to the way you open and close tabs in it.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    Firefox has an additional app called Firefox Focus which installs a content blocker for both Safari and Firefox. Also for Safari, Magic Lasso AdBlocker does a very good job.
- coldpie 6y ago
  I'd like to switch to iPhone, but the lack of real Firefox + uBO is what keeps me from doing it. It's good to know there are some options there, thanks for the pointer.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    If ad blocking is all you’re looking for, I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad in Safari iOS with Firefox focus content blocker, or Wipr content blocker. I don’t notice any difference between Firefox or Chrome + ublock origin and Safari + Wipr/Firefox Focus.
sudosysgen 6y ago
Well, I use FF+uBlock on my phone :) It works super well.
- cmeacham98 6y ago
  They said they're on iOS, where you can only use WebKit, and therefore extensions like uBO are not possible.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Ah, that was edited in after I wrote my comment, sadly.
crocsarecool 6y ago
I can’t look up a recipe for boiled eggs without coming upon a 15 paragraph essay with ads in between each paragraph. It’s so obnoxious now. I don’t mind that people want to monetize, but it’s getting off putting when it is so obnoxious.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  The. Worst. I don’t care at all about any of this. Give me the time they boil for ffs. I don’t know if it’s sites paying by the word, or SEO, or some “value added” psychological trick. It is getting worse.
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    I bet they've noticed 'more time spent on the page' since they added interesting stories to those recipes! "When I was little, Grandma did this and that and blah blah blah". Of course, the time spent is cursing, and skimming and hunting to find useful info. No one is finding the story interesting, but it looks good on metrics? I wonder if the above is accurate or not.
  - jlund-molfese 6y ago
    I think the idea is that Google allegedly prioritizes pages by user dwell time, the idea being that if someone spends 10 minutes on your page, it's more relevant than another page where the user only spends 5 seconds before closing the tab. So forcing you to scroll through an essay on the complete history of nutmeg before you can see any of the ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie recipe may improve SEO
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      but every recipe site I've recently encountered, had a "jump to recipe" link right at the top
  - Kelamir 6y ago
    I use https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ for finding recipes, it has scraped over 2M of them. No distractions.
dont__panic 6y ago
I host my own VPN on a raspberry pi at home so I can use my pi.hole even when I'm off my home wifi network. Unfortunately that seems to be the most comprehensive solution I can find for iOS, and sadly Android phones are pretty much all too large for me.
SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
> Will the general public experience the pleasures of an ad-less internet? Remember how cable was supposed to replace ads on over the air tv? It was about minutes before it was all ads too. Streaming services are starting to get there but then the shows themselves are ads. And you have a scenario where Netflix and YouTube couldn’t exist in scenarios that didn’t rely on our bandwidth models and massive anti-competitive models. ... so IDKMAN... I don’t know how we get to an internet where people making things aren’t expecting to get paid for their submissions, especially now that we’ve jumped in there with both feet. I personally would pay for a no-bullshit internet, but it’s just cable tv’s promise all over again isn’t it? As great as something would start out, soon would come the influencers and the narrative pushers and the censorship and the “forum sliding” and the downvotes / echochambers / bubbles / power tripping moderation... I’m wondering if the solution isn’t just to give it all up and use the tools only when you need them. A cabin in the woods, but a spotty dialup connection for when you need to find something.
- freebuju 6y ago
  > would pay for a no-bullshit internet The money is in selling you ads, on a revolving basis. Not in you ponying up a subscription fee to not see those ads. If it's not the ads, it's the usual FBI or whatever government surveillance program tracking you. You are right on the solution however. Some ads and tracking are so pervasive (e.g smart TVs) that the only truly effective way to mitigate against them is to cut down on or eliminate your exposure to these devices.
Dobbs 6y ago
I run NextDNS on my phone. It isn't perfect particularly because it is an all or nothing type thing which gets frustrating with URL redirects. But it is far better than not.
isatty 6y ago
On an iPhone? I was a noscript user from 10+ years ago (I guess?) and I’ve been using uBo for as long as I can remember but isn’t Firefox on iPhone just a wrapper? Is it battery efficient? As a workaround I use a Pi-Hole (except, not on a pi).
- mcyukon 6y ago
  It is just a webkit wrapper. At least the last time I looked into it. UBlock Origin isn't possible. You can get some Apple sanctioned Ad-Blockers, but I think most (or all?) of them use a invisible VPN with DNS based ad blocking. Mozilla has Firefox Focus for iOS, it does Ad Blocking but it's main selling point is No Tracking, No history and No synced bookmarks either
- xaos____ 6y ago
  Install Firefox focus, go to Safari settings, add Firefox focus as Content Blocker and Firefox ( Not Focus, the real one) will show no ads anymore. Works, because Firefox on iOS is mandated to use the Safari engine
  - mcyukon 6y ago
    Nice, never thought to try that. Makes sense though. Thanks!
    - xaos____ 6y ago
      You are welcome!
nashashmi 6y ago
I hear you. One of the greatest reasons I miss Firefox on android was because it allowed ublock.
kube-system 6y ago
Run pihole or a similar dns solution at the network level, and you can block domains without installing anything on your devices.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  Host based blocking is certainly better than nothing, but uBlock offers much more comprehensive and expansive blocking, not to mention cosmetic filtering and other features that you can't achieve with PiHole/NextDNS/AdguardDNS/Blokada etc..
  - kube-system 6y ago
    For sure, it's not as powerful as something that can modify the DOM, etc. But, you can also run both, if you still prefer uBlock on your PC.
    - approxim8ion 6y ago
      Yup, I agree. Running both right now, the additional benefit of moving DNS queries away from my ISP (I pay for NextDNS) is certainly a good one too
    - computronus 6y ago
      I use both - uBO at the browser level and a PiHole for DNS. It's "defense in depth" - there's more than one layer of defense for something nefarious to get through.
kitsunesoba 6y ago
On iOS, Safari with a couple content blockers (like Purify and/or 1Blocker) do a pretty decent job. Once in a blue moon something will get through, but the goal of dramatically improving load times and decrudding pages is accomplished well enough for me. On Android, Firefox supports a subset of extensions that includes uBlock Origin. Chrome seems to be the dominant browser on Android but regardless of how good it is, I can't imagine not using Firefox there.
- rattray 6y ago
  Firefox is my default browser on Android, and I use Chrome when I need to. It works fine. I personally tend to use Chrome for "logged-in" internet use, and Firefox for "logged-out" use like browsing, news, etc. True on both desktop and mobile. Partly this is because Google's password vault has great UX across Chrome and Android apps.
LegitShady 6y ago
If you have android you can FF + Ublock on android. Sadly ios devices don't seem to have that option.
therealmarv 6y ago
Using Adguard on Android for some years. It works really good with Chrome and all other apps. Mobile browsing without any adblocker is a very bad experience.
nonbirithm 6y ago
If Mozilla can continue honing their mobile browsing team and keep alive a mobile web browser with pre-Manifest v3 WebExtension support, then maybe the status quo doesn't have to change. Advertisers can push whatever they want and the 0.1% of users that want to use uBlock can happily block them all. As far as the current landscape of adblocking goes, I have no real complaints. If people try to encourage too much radical change with how ads are distributed, I fear that the advertising agencies will panic and all start to do what YouTube does, which is to serve the ads from the same domain as the content, rendering all domain-based adblocking useless. At that point, the only thing between the general Internet and ads will be uBlock, and if Google obtains complete control of the WebExtension standards, I'm not sure there would be anything else we could do.
fsflover 6y ago
Firefox with uBlock works fine on my Pinephone ;)
bobiny 6y ago
I’m using this on iOS https://better.fyi/ https://better.fyi/ I don’t remember last time I saw ads.
Svperstar 6y ago
>spoiled by FF+uBlock and I can't tolerate all the distractions. I run FF+uBlock on my S21 Ultra. Works just like the desktop.
- sedatk 6y ago
  Not possible with an iPhone, I presume.
blub 6y ago
Give Brave a try on iOS. Besides offering ad blocking, it can block all JS (unfortunately just an on/off toggle, no subdomain specific settings) and this takes care of most annoyances like cookie pop-ups, article count limiters, ads, etc. On the other hand, mobile websites tend to break more often without JS compared to desktop websites.
mtone 6y ago
My iPad Air 1 is aging, slow, and I loved it but I simply won't replace a machine where a publicly-funded news/docs store app in particular gets laden with unskippable ads. Half a thousand bucks for this frustration, no thanks! No amount of content/entertainment is worth this.
jamesgeck0 6y ago
On iPhone you have Safari content blockers. Better Blocker and Firefox Focus are two popular ones. There's also a Lockdown, an open source firewall implemented using iOS VPN capabilities (though it doesn't send your requests through an external server). Lockdown is able to block trackers in any app, not just Safari.
christophilus 6y ago
Brave on iOS is great. So is the DDG browser.
pacifika 6y ago
Firefox focus includes a decent safari content blocker
pouta 6y ago
Insight Browser. No affiliation, just a very very happy user.
asiachick 6y ago
You can push to force Apple to allow other browser engines. Firefox on Android supports extensions including uBlock Origin. Firefox on iOS is only allowed to be skinned Safari https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
zargon 6y ago
This is one of the top reasons I can't buy an iPhone.
RGamma 6y ago
I have good results with AdGuard on iPhone (functions as content blocker in Safari). It's not perfect and difficult to customize but works well for the most part. It even gets rid of YT video ads (mostly anyway) I also combine it with NextDNS

sackofmugs 6y ago

This is honestly one of the first time I'm convinced in a technical sense to consider Firefox over Chrome. uBlock Origin feels as core to me to web browsing as Saved Passwords and Incognito Mode. That uBlock Origin can work better is like the browser itself being better.

bilekas 6y ago
Firefox does seem to have really improved over the last few iterations, performance also when large numbers of tabs open. I cant find the link right now, but there was a nice timings done where Chrome was using less CPU at lower tab counts, but when it increased count, the CPU utilization was considerably higher than FF. I'll be giving it a fair shake for a few months.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Firefox recently rolled out an update that broke up the big GC passes into small GC passes. That contributed to a huge improvement in responsiveness.
  - bilekas 6y ago
    That might have been related to what I was reading, it looked impressive anyway, I did mean to go check out FF then, I guess now is the time !
  - sfink 6y ago
    That sounds great. But as someone who works on the Firefox GC team, I gotta say: what? Or more specifically, I'm wondering what change you could be referring to. We've had incremental GC for many years now, which does exactly what you describe. It's true that we keep splitting up more of the uninterruptible pieces into smaller chunks, but I don't recall any major change there recently. (I'm not very good at marketing, am I?) And according to telemetry, the incremental slices have been working quite well for most people, at least within the last dozen releases or so. We have a budget, and it's rare that we go over it. Not that I fully trust telemetry; if you have counterexamples please file a bug. (I'd love to have a nice set of scenarios that are problematic for the GC. Our telemetry errs strongly on the side of privacy, as it should, so I can't get URLs automatically.)

staticassertion 6y ago

Sucks, but I'm pretty locked into Chrome. I use GSuite for management, ChromeOS, etc. Maybe it means that uBlock Origin can't protect me as well, but it's pretty hard for me to give up the benefits from all of those other things. I don't see Firefox competing. Mozilla doesn't seem to believe that monetizing a browser is possible, whereas I pay thousands of dollars a year at my company because of Chrome's integrations with these other systems. Until Firefox can compete like that, and maybe they just can't, I can't switch.

asdff 6y ago
why not use g suite on firefox? g suite works fine for me.
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  Yeah, I use G-Suite on FF (with UBO, of course) every single day for work and personal use and have never had a single issue.
eikenberry 6y ago
What situation (job or whatever) has led to such vendor lock-in? Maybe if you gave more details others could avoid your situation.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I think they mean they manage a Google Workplace (formerly G Suite) org themselves, given: > I use GSuite for management Using FF would break existing MDM/DLP policies that they themselves have set up.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  Just to give clarification: a) We're a small tech startup. We use Chromebooks exclusively because it makes corpops/corpsec and compliance trivial. b) Why not Firefox? Maybe Firefox could work, but I'm not sure - with GSuite we can manage Chrome extensions via policy, we can manage Chrome versions, Context Aware Access, etc.

antattack 6y ago

I would use Firefox + uBlock Origin over other browsers even if it was half as fast.

ballballball 6y ago
Preach.
Sebb767 6y ago
You'd loose all that performance gain to ads anyway. I'm truly shocked how horrible the experience is whenever I see someone browsing the web without it.
- errantspark 6y ago
  It's absolutely wild, I have Chrome Canary installed w/o any addons because of some bleeding edge WebBluetooth stuff I'm working on and occasionally I'll forget which browser I'm using and visit a site with it. The web without adblock is basically unusable, it's legitimately completely insane that people will put up with it.
  - AviationAtom 6y ago
    They garbage it up more under the pretenses that too many people are blocking, denying them ad revenue. If they made it less obnoxious then less people would feel the need to block ads. The worst ones for me are the fake virus ads that basically hijack my browser. If you can't keep those out of your ad ecosystem then I'm forced to block it all.
  - freebuju 6y ago
    People don't put up with ads. They are forced upon them. Many of them with no knowledge of how to block them. To them, ads are part and parcel of "using the internet". Some of them hate ads. But not for technical reasons though. Outside of complaining why they hate that annoying ad from company X, most people probably won't be motivated enough to actually do anything about it. For some, this is just how they expect the "internet" to work. An ad-free one would feel broken to them. Ads are not a bother for most casual people.

clircle 6y ago

This is technical and interesting, but can anyone tell the difference between web browsing with FF/uBo and Chrome/uBo? I personally cannot, other than that the fonts render a bit differently. Webpages load fast and no ads get through in both cases.

timbit42 6y ago
The first chart in the article explains the difference. It's not so much about being able to tell the difference, but how much it is protecting you in the background.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  To be fair the only difference there seems to be from a future RC release of uBO that isn't even out yet, and also that has to do more with third-party tracking cookies more so than ad-blocking, so most users probably wouldn't notice it. It's not about speed, it's about the probability of detecting these CNAME cloaked tracking.
davidgerard 6y ago
Google searches on Chromium load the page, then insert three or four ad links before the first result about a second later. Ridiculously annoying, as I'm used to clicking quickly on the desired result.

podiki 6y ago

I can't live without uBlock Origin and uMatrix, and was sad to see uMatrix archived [0]. Still works great, but I'm wondering what will happen long term. Anyone also use both and since drop uMatrix for something else, or just uBlock? How is it? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973

donatzsky 6y ago
As I remember it, you really shouldn't be using both at the same time. Don't remember why, only that it's a bad idea. And you can set up uBlock to do most of what uMatrix does anyway.
- Valmar 6y ago
  It's because there was some overlap in their functionality. What I did was disable the overlapping functionality in uBlock Origin, and let uMatrix handle the rest.
freedomben 6y ago
uMatrix is so fundamental to my web experience, I dread the day it stops working.
caoilte 6y ago
It's been really interesting to watch recent gorhill tweets where he describes some laboured efforts to type in rules to block content in ublock that you can do in umatrix with the click of a button. I don't understand it, but I agree that unlock+umatrix on desktop and mobile has been the best thing about browsing for years. I think maybe he wants to consolidate Dev effort and I completely understand. He's probably the only person I'm patriotic about right now.
callesgg 6y ago
So do you have it installed in your pacemaker or something...?
coldpie 6y ago
FWIW, I use uBO together with NoScript, on both desktop and on mobile (Android). I've never used uMatrix, and I've been told by others that it was a superior experience, but if you want a combination that is still being supported, I can recommend this combo.

bassdropvroom 6y ago

> The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store. Anyone know what this extra permission is and why requesting this extra permission would cause friction?

10000truths 6y ago
My guess is that it’s much harder to review WASM bytecode to make sure it doesn’t do anything sketchy.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  Surely the ublock devs are not writing WASM directly? It would be possible to have the source code available for audit with some way of proving it generates the assembly that is being shipped.
  - tmp538394722 6y ago
    Sorry anything is possible, but your comment is a bit hand wavy. Reproducible builds are non trivial. And then what - the reviewer is now supposed to build your software and verify some Hash? Or were you thinking something else?
    - wnevets 6y ago
      >And then what - the reviewer is now supposed to build your software I believe that is standard operating procedure for the chrome store.
    - seba_dos1 6y ago
      > Reproducible builds are non trivial. That's true, but they aren't rocket science either. It's perfectly reasonable to require them for browser extensions.
- 6y ago

throw0101a 6y ago

Can someone ELI5 the pros and cons of using uBlock Origin and/or uMatrix? Should I be using one, either, both? Are they competitors or complementary? What does each do best?

noisem4ker 6y ago
uMatrix is unmaintained and most of its functionality is supposed to be available in uBlock Origin in advanced mode.
DannyB2 6y ago
uMatrix provides fine grained control in a matrix by domain names (rows) vs various permissions to grant (columns). Example: Allow domain foo.com to run scripts, but domain bar.com cannot run script, no cookies, but css and images are okay.
redis_mlc 6y ago
If you're on a Mac, using Firefox with uBlock Origin is a realy nice experience: - no ads on Youtube - I prefer the Firefox dev tools over Chrome for vanilla-js. FYI: I'm one of the earliest and longest-term users of Firefox, starting at Netscape in 2000. Never had a reason to switch.

xoa 6y ago

Wow, what an awesome dive into some of the technical aspects behind one of my favorite tools for using the web. And I do think of it that way these days, it's fairly stunning on some sites to switch off all the block and see how they become genuinely unbrowsable. I remember seeing Gorhill discuss a few times over the years some of the reqs for uBO during certain times (like why it could no longer work with Safari following changes Apple made a while back), but so cool to have it all collected in one place. Having said that I've also been fairly stunned recently to see how much difference a simple DNS blacklist system can make too. Not because it's a big technical achievement but because it isn't and in principle seems relatively trivial to work around. But as I've been switching all my routing from UniFi to OPNsense, I've gone ahead and tried out Unbound's basic built-in blacklisting. While it's no uBO, it works on every single device and browser including in apps and it seems like it really shouldn't, that more parties would just be proxying ads through their own infra and DNS. Been kind of an interesting illustration of technical vs economic influences in an ecosystem. I can see how proxying would add complexity and cost to setup so it must just be that few enough people do it the ad industry can't be bothered. But should that ever catch on (and it could, Raspberry Pi seems fairly well known) I expect uBO to be able to keep up with the cat-and-mouse long after DNS has been left behind. This piece helps underline how incredibly important maintaining a critical level of diversity in the browser ecosystem is. Just shortly ago there were a bunch of complaints again about Apple not allowing Chrome to be on iOS because it "holds back the web", but what "holding back the web" looks like is certainly a matter of perspective...

estaseuropano 6y ago
I guess the issue with proxying is that the ad provider has less control/data and can't be sure whether views are genuine.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  That’s great if you’re right, because it means it is a fundamental limitation that can’t easily be worked around.
  - 6y ago

pharmakom 6y ago

I love Firefox and I use it on principle. I don’t think I have a worse web experience, although that wouldn’t stop me. What does break websites is turning on anti-tracking measures. The number of times a site won’t work till I enable third party cookies shows the sad state of the web. Developers, do you only test in Chrome on Windows with default settings or something?

skizm 6y ago
"Whatever gets my jira from the left side of the board to the right side of the board."
l3_ 6y ago
the tab containers are amazing
noahtallen 6y ago
> The number of times a site won’t work till I enable third party cookies shows the sad state of the web. Developers, do you only test in Chrome on Windows with default settings or something? Well, Chrome is removing 3rd-party cookies by next year, and they are disabled by default in Safari already (well, sort of, ITP is weird). So many problems which used to happen to very few users are now being quickly prioritized. There are lots of use cases for third party cookies (example: you have a centralized management platform for lots of websites which have unique mapped domains, and you want to be authenticated against all of them at once), so it’s not surprising that critical features can be broken. It’s very much backwards incompatible. But I agree, overall removing 3rd party cookies is great. Though, it’s important that whatever advertisers think of next isn’t just as bad.
toastal 6y ago
I've hated my experience with resistFingerprinting enabled. I can't get dark themes, my clock and times are always wrong, you're locked to en-US, no WebGL, etc.; basically any feature that could make the web nicer and have content tailored for be is now weaponized for fingerprinting. I've recently switched off fingerprint resistance and moved to a script blocker as the sites I do trust do offer a nicer experience I've been missing out on.

egberts1 6y ago

Latest Firefox really does a good job supporting MULTIPLE video frames. - Something that I have yet to see on Chrome.

pjfin123 6y ago

Great write up! I hope Brave can improve on this.

yepguy 6y ago
I doubt Brave will do anything about it, because ad blocking in Brave is built-in and implemented without the extension APIs. https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
blub 6y ago
Brave is doing something similar: https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/

apozem 6y ago

I really, really wish Apple would update Safari for uBlock Origin. I’m about to publish a Safari extension (a NoScript equivalent) and the content blocking APIs are so limited. iOS is even worse than the Mac, too. On iOS AFAIK you can’t even reload the page for the user.

sjwright 6y ago
> you can’t even reload the page for the user Can you explain why you'd want to do this? At first blush it seems like a terrible idea to allow extensions to reload pages.
- DamnInteresting 6y ago
  I created an extension that flushes all cookies and local storage for the current domain; it then reloads the page so you appear to be a fresh new visitor.
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    Name?
    - DamnInteresting 6y ago
      It's called "Howdy Stranger", it's listed in both Firefox and Chrome official add-on stores.
      - carlhjerpe 6y ago
        You just got yourself an install. The VMware partner portal is so buggy i need to do temporary containers all the time, but this is nice. Thanks mate!
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  On the ublock origin UI you can click a little icon in the toolbar pull up the settings for that page. There is a little icon you that shows you whether it is enabled or disabled both in the toolbar and in this settings page. Clicking it in the settings page toggles the state for that page which is retained next time you visit. When you change the state a little refresh icon appears right behind the status icon indicating that the state of the page as shown doesn't match your setting. Clicking it reloads the page. You could reload it automatically at state change but this might break whatever the user is in the middle of doing. You don't have to have this feature but it is handy that the reminder that the page is out of sync is a button to fix this and that it is half an inch from your current mouse position.

nwmcsween 6y ago

Just reinstalled Firefox due to this info

mentos 6y ago
Yea not sure if anyone on the Firefox team is reading but I have not had any reason to consider Firefox until reading this thread. If Firefox made their browser the best at ad-blocking instead of performance (which also might go hand in hand) I would consider using it again.
- kaba0 6y ago
  I’m fairly sure they have made their browser the best at ad-blocking already. But due to human nature, negatives like daring to remove some feature with minuscule usage gets heavily upvoted.
- smabie 6y ago
  Is Firefox worse than Chrome in anyway? Performance seems on par and it has a truly transformative app that iirc is unavailable in chrome: treetabs.
  - tfehring 6y ago
    >Is Firefox worse than Chrome in anyway? IME Firefox is much more of a battery hog on MacOS, Chrome's history page is much better, and some sites (Glassdoor and Google Meet come to mind) don't work properly in Firefox. And I don't really use the developer tools in either but I've generally heard that Chrome's are better. I still use Firefox as my daily driver but it's not flawless.
    - depressedpanda 6y ago
      I don't use Glassdoor, but Google Meet works fine in Firefox, at least as far as I can tell. What issues are you experiencing? The dev tools in Firefox are better for working with CSS [1], about as good for everything else. I only resort to Chromium when working with PWAs. [1]: https://youtu.be/a-V8GFtwjos https://youtu.be/a-V8GFtwjos

BigGreenTurtle 6y ago

uBlock Origin helped me get a vaccine appointment despite the scheduling system's attempt to make it as hard as possible. Thanks!

sandeepbhat 6y ago

Really nice post!! I almost got confused with uBlox at the start. https://www.u-blox.com/en https://www.u-blox.com/en

blub 6y ago

I started using Brave in addition to Firefox recently and I was curious if it supports this. Seems like it does (https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/) and uBlock origin was the inspiration for that feature. I never used uBlock, but I did use uMatrix (discontinued, but still working) which allows you very fine grained control over scripts and other resources based on the domain. Unfortunately it was a pain to get some things to work with that, especially online payments which use many subdomains and redirects. Paying for anything online was a game of enabling 10 domains on average, reloading the website, re-inputting payment info, etc. Some websites (like twitter) simply didn't work even if one enabled all the domains which appeared in the matrix. Brave is pretty decent at blocking JS. Not as fine grained as uMatrix, and it apparently doesn't remember that you enabled things (at least in private browsing). I think it doesn't perform what uBlock calls HTML filtering, because it still makes requests to websites which were completely neutered by uMatrix. All in all it's more pleasant to surf using Brave than Firefox, because fewer websites are broken by the blocking. I wasn't pleased with Safari's native tracking protection + a simple Safari blocking extension which only looks at URLs. Websites work the best, but it's making requests to many unwanted domains still. Maybe it's blocking cookies and scripts, no idea, but I'm not happy even with the simple requests for resources going through.

surround 6y ago
Brave is Chromium-based and suffers from all of the limitations stated in the parent article. (Except for CNAME cloaking. However, their CNAME uncloaking only applies to their built-in tracking protection. AFAIK, if you use uBo on Brave it will be still unable to uncloak CNAMES.)
- blub 6y ago
  While uBlock inside Brave suffers from the same limitations as uBlock within Chrome, the more interesting question is if Brave's native blocking makes that irrelevant or not. Brave does have a few intriguing privacy features, like plugging WebRTC IP leaks while still allowing use of WebRTC (Firefox is off or on while Safari's always on AFAIK), so that's not excluded. The main problem with Brave is that they're building on a browser which is designed to leak privacy like a sieve. It seems that they're being careful and monitoring all the anti-features Google's adding, but who knows.

OJFord 6y ago

Such a shame uMatrix was discontinued. uBlock Origin comes close, and surpasses in some ways (I used both for that reason) but lacks separate control of cookies, images, scripts, etc. So you can't accept a particular third party's images without also accepting its scripts, cookies, etc. I mention it mainly in the hope that we can popularise its maintained fork 'nuTensor'. After trying uBlock (as in attempting to also cover what I used to use uMatrix for) for a few weeks I think it's insufficient and nuTensor is the better option for me, but it quickly won't be if ~nobody uses it and it falls by the wayside. Alternatively uBO could support the few details it lacks from uM? It seems like the problem basically was difficulty/time constraints in supporting both.. but I don't know why they were ever separate? There's plenty of overlap. If uBO had uM's granularity in 'advanced mode', that'd be perfect.

Demiurge 6y ago
I agree it's a shame, and I hope there is a legit replacement. However, it continues to work for me, so far, without issues.
birksherty 6y ago
I find ublock much more granular than umatrix. It can block all js and allow a particular one, block just a segment of inline scripts. It can block separately a single script, image or any other request. I find it much better than umatrix which can't do many things that ublock does. If someone wantd to they can just install it and forget it also. Much more versatile.
gxnxcxcx 6y ago
> So you can't accept a particular third party's images without also accepting its scripts, cookies, etc. It's a clunky interface with poor discoverability, but with the uBO logger open in a browser tab you can click on any request right beside the timestamp and define a new rule with the desired granularity. In the URL Rule tab, the unmarked left column sets the allow/noop/block behavior. Edit: Found the wiki page: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger#creating-filters https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger#creating-f...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Sephr 6y ago

> The Firefox version of uBO use LZ4 compression by default to store raw filter lists, compiled list data, and memory snapshots to disk storage. This doesn't explain why the Chrome version doesn't use LZ4 or better by default. There are native JS implementations of LZ4 available as well that don't require WebAssembly.

franklyt 6y ago

I should note that, on iOS, it seems that Safari with a content blocker outperforms the brave skin by a little, which outperforms the Firefox skin by a lot, which outperforms the chrome skin by a lot.

smoldesu 6y ago
What a brilliant and unexpected turnout.

FridgeSeal 6y ago

> Chromium-based browsers give precedence to websites over user settings when it comes to decide whether pre-fetching is disabled or not. Classic google/chrome “Yeah I know you’ve got these setting, but I’m just going to ignore them because this website wants to do it”.

Groxx 6y ago

>At browser launch, Firefox will wait for uBO to be up and ready before network requests are fired from already opened tab(s). >This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers, i.e. tracker/advertisement payloads may find their way into already opened tabs before uBO is up and ready in Chromium-based browsers, while these are properly filtered in Firefox. >Reliably blocking at browser launch is especially important for whoever uses default-deny mode for 3rd-party resources and/or JavaScript. Oof. TIL. That makes blockers kinda crippled in chromes, if you expect them to actually block things.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
Google has an obvious incentive to make life hard for ad blocking extension developers. Chrome and chromium exist because their business model is showing ads in it. That's the only reason it exists. Everything else it does is there only to convince users to use it and thus get exposed to ads and tracking. That includes performance work, UX work, etc. that Google puts a lot of time and money in. It makes Chrome really nice to use. Mozilla and Firefox exists because it's developers wanted to create the best browser possible. That's why it had extensions before Chrome was even a thing and that's why ad blocking extensions exist almost as long as extensions have been a thing. Adblock emerged somewhere around 2002 which was very soon after the first OSS releases by Mozilla reached the 1.0 stage. Also Phoenix, Firefox' ancestor became a thing around that time. Tabs and extensions were some of the early things that made that popular. Ad blocking always was the #1 use case for extensions. Ironically, that's why Chrome has extensions. The only reason it supports extensions is that not having that would have made it impossible to grab market share from Firefox (and Internet Explorer). Having support for both extensions and ad blocking were a hard requirement for Google despite its business model. But now that it is the dominant browser, that feature is no longer as important as it once was. So, Google has been slowly making it harder for extensions to interfere with their ads and tracking. They can't make it too hard or their market share will evaporate. But they don't have to be particularly good at it. And now that they have Android, they don't have to worry as much about losing market share. Android exists for the exact same reason. Chrome is losing relevance as a revenue stream as users consume more content on Android via "native" apps running in a virtual machine compiled against mandatory proprietary ad & tracking technology.

Black101 6y ago

I have v1.34.0 ... is that RC1? But either way, I take this wonderful tool for granted since I have been using it forever (and its predecessors).

miralize 6y ago

I'd love to move to Firefox, but I havent committed to fully because the Profiles and the corresponding switching mechanism in Chrome is just too good. I don't want to use containers to manage the different work/personal profiles I have and the lack of easy way to toggle between the two (a keyboard shortcut) has been a deal-breaker every time I tried to switch. The profile manager in Firefox is long overdue a revamp.

theon144 6y ago
Honest question, in what ways is switching entire profiles better than containers?

ck2 6y ago

It even works well on firefox android which is arguably more important though I am not sure about that products future after the complete rewrite.

perryizgr8 6y ago

> Pre-fetching, which is disabled by default in uBO, is reliably prevented in Firefox, while this is not the case in Chromium-based browsers. I really wish ubo wouldn't disable pre fetching. It has nothing to do with blocking ads. It just slows down the browser.

vietvu 6y ago

Wait, you guys are using other browser than Firefox?

scaladev 6y ago
I see lots of comments here assuming absolutely everybody uses Chromium-based browsers. The Firefox "cult" (which I have been a part of since 1.5) is a bubble inside a bubble.

mastrsushi 6y ago

www works best with Chromium-based browsers

lenova 6y ago

Slightly off-topic, but it was Firefox's Total Cookie Protection recently that finally got to me to switch from Chrome as my daily driver. Don't get me wrong, I miss Chrome as it just felt like a_smoother_ user experience, and I fear for Firefox replaying Opera's history given that the rest of the industry has standardized on Chromium... but I love how pro-privacy Firefox is.

prox 6y ago
I always have the opposite idea, Chrome is a total mess for me when it comes to UX. Probably just what you are used to first.
- wojcikstefan 6y ago
  I disagree. I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser for at least 3 years now and still, whenever I have to fire up Chrome for some reason, my first impression is “ahh, this is sadly still so much smoother.”
  - hansel_der 6y ago
    i disagree. imo peak browser-ux was around 2005 with the original opera. pre-quantum firefox was ok-ish but already part of the decline.

bosswipe 6y ago

From the beginning Firefox's advantage was that it was a platform for extensions. Crowdsourcing features that later became standard, such as ad blocking and web debugging. It's mind-blowing to me that Mozilla has been on a quest to kill extensions and customization in the name of simplicity and supposed security. They will never be able to beat the wealthiest companies in human history that way.

cybert00th 6y ago

I truly hope gorhill is able to continue offering his services to the wider Internet community for a long time still to come. Our children have grown up on a, largely, ad-free Internet; and it's all thanks to people like him.

danShumway 6y ago

I made this prediction a little over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21506330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21506330 > after one year of Manifest V3 actually shipping to users in mainline Chrome: > - Assuming that Manifest V3's declarative API is not significantly changed from its current implementation. > - If you visit each of the top 10 publishers in the US (including open publishing platforms like Twitter/Facebook/Youtube) [...] > - Firefox will block more web trackers (65% likelyhood). > - Firefox will block more visible ads and popups (55% likelyhood). It's debatable whether or not the December rollout of Manifest V3 "counts" because Manifest V2 is still going to be available for about a year, but it's also increasingly looking like it won't matter -- the prediction might end up being proven right regardless of whether or not Manifest V2 is removed. I would probably raise these likelihoods if I were to revisit the prediction today. I think it's reasonably unlikely that CNAME masking is going to go down in popularity, and I think it's reasonably unlikely that Chrome is going to put in the effort to catch back up. The one thing that gives me pause is that the original prediction specified looking at the top 10 publishers, and I'm not sure if any of them are using CNAME masking yet.

Scottn1 6y ago

I've been a daily user and advocate of Firefox since Opera changed to using Chromium. But recently I've grown tired of their privacy hypocrisy and company decisions that I've uninstalled it and started to try out Edge/Brave/Vivaldi as my daily. It has pained me to do this as FF was my last safe haven away from Chromium. If you dig into some settings and follow tech news, I have begun to question some of Mozilla's controversial settings, deals with 3rd parties and their political blog posts. I also have a problem with the CEO making $3m per year yet a continued market share decline since she came on. Just a few of the things off the top of my head that I feel betray my trust of Firefox (all of these pertain to default Windows install): 1) Enabled by default all of your website DNS requests going to Cloudflare with a "promise" this information is not being used or sold. We all know how solid this promise has been for other large tech companies. All under the promotion that DoH protects you from your own ISP. 2) Upon install, FF installs a scheduled service that runs daily. From what I've found out, that service is sending back to Mozilla what your default browser is on YOUR PC (why is that their business). This scheduled service remains on your PC even after uninstalling Firefox and continues to run daily. 3) Enabled by default are Browser Studies and testing a clean install one is already installed and active called "F100 Snippets". Studies allow the Firefox team to install stuff right to your browser whenever they want, to gather telemetry . 4) "Recommended extensions" enabled by default. Got a nag for a recommended extension after few days of browsing. So FF must be scanning your browsing history in order for this to work? 5) this result: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traffic-results/ https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... . While it was from 2019 so needs to be updated, but upon first-run I was shocked at the results for FF here. 6) Firefox on Android has a known tracker embedded and enabled by default called Leanplum. From Mozilla's own website they state "Leanplum is a mobile marketing vendor" I'd love to support and use FF solely again, but I think they need some serious shaking up, starting with a new CEO (who allows this stuff).

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Yeah that's all true maybe but the other vendors are far worse AFAIK.
- 6y ago

Synaesthesia 6y ago

One of the reasons I still like Firefox for Android is uBlock Origin, as well as a few other extensions.

dash2 6y ago

Tools like this are cutting off the branch they are sitting on. If you block all the ads on an ad-supported website, how will it survive?

socceroos 6y ago
Adapt? That's what most industries that face change do. How did sites survive before the ad infestation business model?
- dash2 6y ago
  Could you be more specific, and say what strategies an ad-supported site might use to provide the same content?
black_puppydog 6y ago
The branch that uBlock sits on is not ad revenue. It's people's annoyance at constantly being subjected to intrusive user tracking, especially for sites that they have little choice to not use. Think social networks and banks. Sure you can refuse to use them entirely on principle, but it's not a practical approach if you want to actually have a life. On top of that, much of the tracking that does go on is actually blatantly illegal in how it's done, at least in the EU. It's just too small-time to enforce at scale. Doesn't mean I have to take this as a given.
- dash2 6y ago
  I agree that tracking and ads are different. But uBlock does include ad-blocking functionality. The discussion here suggests that most people use it for that.
sellyme 6y ago
> If you block all the ads on an ad-supported website, how will it survive? If the only thing that website provides of value is a billboard, it doesn't deserve to. I'm perfectly happy paying for high-quality ad-free services.

korginator 6y ago

Long-time monthly donor to Firefox here, and have been a Mozilla / Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox user for a couple of decades now. I still think their principles are worth supporting but I'm starting to question their choice of priorities. IMHO they seem to be losing focus on their technical strengths - making a browser their audience wants to use. Over the past year I'm seeing a lot more problems with addons, specially on Linux. Several popular addons like umatrix and ublock origin make the UX sluggish, interacting with the addons UX are hit and miss, and such operations are often unresponsive for me. I'm seeing this on Ubuntu, PopOS and Mint. Mac and windows variants work reasonably well for me, but it's come to a point where I've reluctantly switched to Vivaldi for day to day personal use. My thanks and appreciation for Raymond Hill's excellent work. Though the technical aspects favor Firefox in theory, the extension / addon works far better with Chromium based browsers in practice for me.

f6v 6y ago

I had to resort to using Firefox with uBlock to watch YouTube. I can’t make it work on Safari with ad blockers, which is a shame.

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diragon 6y ago

I have difficulties understanding why everyone's using Chrome-based browsers, when it's obvious how bad they are for privacy.

matkoniecz 6y ago
Many people do not really care about privacy or are not convinced that Firefox is significantly better.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > Firefox is significantly better Most people use browsers for facebook, gmail, youtube, and things like banking, taxes, etc. It's common that, when facing any issue when using Firefox - with banking and government sites, you are going to be told to try using chrome. So, for the end user, chrome is the better browser, as more sites work properly on it.
  - depressedpanda 6y ago
    People keep saying that web sites don't work in Firefox, but it's never happened to me. Why is that?
    - matkoniecz 6y ago
      You likely look at different sites, like HN that is well designed rather that a decoration around ad delivery mechanism.
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rchaud 6y ago
Chrome is a product of one of the biggest corporations in the world and marketed and distributed as such. Firefox was big between 2004-2010 if I recall. Chrome came out in 2008, and needed a couple of a years to really dominate mindshare. The growth of Android helped as well.

ilovepitchdecks 6y ago

uBlock Origin has been my favorite browser extension for years (it's in fact the only one I have installed). These days I only use it for YouTube however. The best way to avoid ads is not to visit sites that have them.

prvc 6y ago

Would love to see benchmarks of Firefox vs Chrome, both with their respective versions of uBO.

mbrodersen 6y ago

Things I actually care about that does not work best on Firefox: 1. Scrolling. 2. Save to PDF.