8 ms·

Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Despite all their made-up "security" reasons, everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effecti

by sho 2y ago

Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Despite all their made-up "security" reasons, everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective. For many users, adblock is what makes chrome bearable - and if they make it unbearable, then those users will leave. Slowly but surely. Google seems much too sure of itself making this change. I hope their arrogance pays off just the same as Microsoft's did with IE.

Rychard 2y ago
The widespread adoption of Chrome was largely driven by word of mouth, people like you and I installing it on our friend's/relative's computers and telling them it was safer/faster/better. Nothing stops us from doing the same thing again. I've been recommending Firefox to all my family/friends/colleagues for years (ever since I've seen the writing on the wall for Chrome). While Firefox isn't perfect, it's in a much better place than Chrome is, and meets the the needs of nearly 100% of people.
- undercut 2y ago
  >The widespread adoption of Chrome was largely driven by word of mouth No, it was driven by having a banner in the most privileged spot of the Internet, Google.com (the most visited site in the world with 0 ads on the homepage) saying that was faster and more secure than the alternatives. In fact Firefox benefited from some free ads on Google.com against Internet Explorer before Google developed Chromium.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    It was kind of both, depending on the timeline. Early on it was word of mouth, then Google saw they had momentum and they capitalized on it with the banners and aggressive marketing.
    - undercut 2y ago
      It was a long time ago but I'm 99% sure that there was a banner for Chrome on Google.com since the first public release.
    - j_maffe 2y ago
      They were pushing from the very start. They knew the potential of taking over the browser market share.
    - pkasting 2y ago
      So many replies in this sub thread opining authoritatively. Share your source. Did you have access to the data on Chrome's user growth and which marketing campaigns were the sources of which users? From my perspective, all of you are saying a lot of things as if you know them to be true, but you have no idea whether they're true or not; really, you just find them to be plausible.
      - lucianbr 2y ago
        Is this really something particular to this thread? I feel like most comments on HN are "opining authoritatively".
  - cyberpunk 2y ago
    … isn’t that banner an ad?
  - Uehreka 2y ago
    Yeah, I feel like in general we on HN give ourselves way too much credit in terms of our ability to drive public opinion or affect purchasing/usage patterns among the public. The idea of the “nerd-led revolution” may have had some impact in the past, but I think the days of that are over. Large corporations now know what they’re doing in ways that they hadn’t figured out in the 2000s or even the early 2010s.
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    The other aspect, somewhat memory-holed, was that Chrome was automatically installed as shovelware if you went to install Adobe Flash for IE or Firefox: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/23jnmy/why_is_chrome_bundled_with_flash_like_shovelware/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/23jnmy/why_is_chrom... This kind of not-freely-given consent was key to Chrome's growth.
    - badwolf 2y ago
      Chrome was bundled with so many installers. Google probably spent billions shoving Chrome into any machine they could.
      - hyperdimension 2y ago
        Tellingly, that very bundling is how Sundar got into the spotlight at Google.
  - x0x0 2y ago
    Early chrome was driven by the fact that firefox was a piece of garbage. Firefox 3 was not good software, and had an unpleasant habit of totally crashing the entire browser regularly. Your only other popular choice was ie8. Also not great. Later Google's ability to buy installs and put it on google.com came into play, but for at least the first 5 years and probably longer, chrome was a far faster, more secure, and more reliable choice. They also pioneered the multi-process model to isolate different components of the browser.
- Izkata 2y ago
  I swear I also remember it getting included in installation wizards for unrelated software (on Windows), so people would end up with Chrome/Chromium without even realizing it.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    I’ve been out of the windows game for so long I forgot all that malware that was installed by various installer engines and was so relieved when I found portable apps and oldversion.com and ninite. And now I guess there are things like chocolaty that do similar things. Switching to Mac and Linux I don’t really miss it at all
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Did you miss the barrage of ads for Chrome that google played for literally years on the internet and television?
  - Zak 2y ago
    Yes. Thanks adblock!
- icehawk 2y ago
  The adoption of firefox was driven by word of mouth. I still can't search on google with them trying to shove chrome down my throat
freedomben 2y ago
Agreed on hoping this is the inflection point, but only partial agreement that it's about adblock. For sure Google wants adblock to die, but I think it goes even deeper than that. I think it's part of a much bigger trend in tech in general but also in Google: Removing user control. When you look at the "security" things they are doing, many of them have a common philosophy underpinning them that the user (aka device owner) is a security threat and must be protected against. Web integrity, Manifest v3, various DoH/DoT, bootloader locking, device integrity which conveniently makes root difficult/impossible, and more. To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in. The next generation won't have the wonderful and fertile computing environment that we enjoyed, and it's (partly) your fault.
- justanotheratom 2y ago
  yes, iOS now restricts Apps from getting blanket access to their contacts, photos, and even clipboard. On the one hand, it does protect the user from malicious Apps that trick users into giving blanket access. On the other hand, they could have atleast done it like location access - where user still has an option to give blanket access. It is not fair that Siri is the only one that can access these things now.
  - moi2388 2y ago
    It can. You can still give apps access to all of it with a single press. And manifest v3 makes things a bit more tedious but not impossible. There are other adblockers which still function just fine
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    That's literally how iOS works today. If I go into Settings > Privacy & Security > Photos, I can give apps None, Limited Access, or Full Access. Same with Contacts, same with the clipboard (where the per-app choices are Ask, Deny, or Allow). > It is not fair that Siri is the only one that can access these things now. That would be true if it was, but it isn't.
- 2y ago
crazygringo 2y ago
> everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective I thought I knew that. Then I switched from uBlock Origin to uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome, which is compatible with Manifest v3. I was prepared for the horrible onslaught of ads, expecting at least a quarter would start getting through, ready to switch to Firefox... ...and didn't notice a single change. Not a single ad gets through. And at the same time, loading pages feels a little faster, though I haven't measured it. Which has now got me wondering -- what if Manifest v3 really was about security and performance all along? Because if Google was using it to kill adblockers, they've made approximately 0% progress towards that goal as far as I can tell. If they really wanted to kill adblockers, they'd just, you know, kill adblockers. But they didn't at all.
- moi2388 2y ago
  It makes things a bit more annoying? But in v3 you can still do everything you need to do to block ads
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  > ...and didn't notice a single change. Not a single ad gets through. When I tried UBO Lite recently it couldn't block YouTube ads, not sure if that's impossible with Manifest V3, or if UBO Lite just isn't updated regularly like UBO to defeat the YouTube anti-ad-blocking updates. Update: looks like it's fixed now, not bad :)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Youtube's adblocker-evasion and adblocker's youtube ad blocking has been a cat-and-mouse game since time immemorial.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  People seem to see what they want. And many seem to be blinded by Google hate and must find ways to be unhappy with all decisions they make. Google has publicly delayed v2 depreciation to ensure ad blockers worked well under v3.
moooo99 2y ago
Adblock doesn’t only make Google Chrome bearable, it makes the internet bearable. I recently uninstalled my Adblock for testing purposes. Most websites nowadays are just ads with a little bit of text in between
DataDive 2y ago
> Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Here is one empirical data point. I switched over to Firefox this morning and will advocate for it. I've considered it for a while, but I never felt motivated to make the switch. It took me a good half hour to set it up the way I like it.
- heelix 2y ago
  This is sort of like planting trees. I cut bait on chrome when they first announced they were dropping/impacting adblockers. For the most part, things are good enough the only time I spin up chrome is confirming something renders as expected on a personal site. Firefox works well enough for streaming and surfing.
karaterobot 2y ago
I'd like to think that's true, but I don't know, because people seem to have a very high tolerance for advertisements. Surprisingly so. I have a very low tolerance, and do what I can to get rid of them. But then, every once in a while I use someone else's computer and see how they live with them. I say "I can show you how to get rid of those ads," but they usually just don't care enough to do it. I bet the majority of people are like that—maybe the vast majority—and Google is probably making the same bet, but with even more information. My prediction is that if (God willing) Chrome loses significant market share, it'll be for some other reason than this.
kmlx 2y ago
> making adblock less effective adblocking still works just fine on Safari, which has been doing the same thing as Manifest V3 for years now.
- timeon 2y ago
  Ad-blockers are not just about displaying the actual ads. Does the Chrome blocks trackers even without ad-blocker Like Safari?
  - kmlx 2y ago
    my adblocker on Safari blocks everything, including trackers. no idea about Chrome.
yupyupyups 2y ago
Yeah, I don't browse the web without an ad blocker.
wooque 2y ago
I'd argue it won't make a dent in Chrome market share. People who really care about this (tech minded people) are not using Chrome anyway, others (regular people) will switch to less powerful Manifest V3 adblockers that would probably be good enough and won't switch from Chrome.
throwaway48476 2y ago
So, are you going to leave chrome then?
spankalee 2y ago
What makes you say the security reasons are made up?
- Zak 2y ago
  I can take this question. They removed webRequestBlocking, used mainly by adblockers, but left webRequest. The security implications are the same for both, but only the former is optimized for content blocking.
ragnese 2y ago
The vast, vast, majority of normies I know use Google Chrome and use zero extensions.
mossTechnician 2y ago
I've been checking browser stat counters religiously, looking for evidence that this change is driving their numbers down. No luck so far. Am I missing any? https://gs.statcounter.com https://gs.statcounter.com https://analytics.usa.gov https://analytics.usa.gov https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Manifest v3 changes are pretty reasonable. Declarative filtering that prevents untrustworthy software from getting access to data is objectively a good thing. It's just that uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should have access to everything. Truth be told it should be literally built into the browser itself and deeply integrated with it. Only conflicts of interest prevent that. Can't trust an ad company to maintain ad blockers after all.
- quotemstr 2y ago
  The problem isn't the declarative filtering per se. The problem is the draconian limit on the number of filters. Given that we can compile regular expressions to DFAs and evaluate them in O(len(url)) time no matter how many patterns we have, there's little reason to place an arbitrary cap on the sophistication of an extension's filtering.
- 10000truths 2y ago
  There was already an established solution for running untrusted code - the WebAssembly engine sandbox. Data can't be exfiltrated if imported functions are forbidden, which would be very easy to verify via static analysis of the WASM module. All of this hullabaloo about Manifest v3 could have been avoided if the Chrome team did the sane thing and exposed an API for using a WebAssembly module for filtering.

by sho 2y ago

Rychard 2y ago

The widespread adoption of Chrome was largely driven by word of mouth, people like you and I installing it on our friend's/relative's computers and telling them it was safer/faster/better. Nothing stops us from doing the same thing again. I've been recommending Firefox to all my family/friends/colleagues for years (ever since I've seen the writing on the wall for Chrome). While Firefox isn't perfect, it's in a much better place than Chrome is, and meets the the needs of nearly 100% of people.

undercut 2y ago
>The widespread adoption of Chrome was largely driven by word of mouth No, it was driven by having a banner in the most privileged spot of the Internet, Google.com (the most visited site in the world with 0 ads on the homepage) saying that was faster and more secure than the alternatives. In fact Firefox benefited from some free ads on Google.com against Internet Explorer before Google developed Chromium.
- freedomben 2y ago
  It was kind of both, depending on the timeline. Early on it was word of mouth, then Google saw they had momentum and they capitalized on it with the banners and aggressive marketing.
  - undercut 2y ago
    It was a long time ago but I'm 99% sure that there was a banner for Chrome on Google.com since the first public release.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    They were pushing from the very start. They knew the potential of taking over the browser market share.
  - pkasting 2y ago
    So many replies in this sub thread opining authoritatively. Share your source. Did you have access to the data on Chrome's user growth and which marketing campaigns were the sources of which users? From my perspective, all of you are saying a lot of things as if you know them to be true, but you have no idea whether they're true or not; really, you just find them to be plausible.
    - lucianbr 2y ago
      Is this really something particular to this thread? I feel like most comments on HN are "opining authoritatively".
- cyberpunk 2y ago
  … isn’t that banner an ad?
- Uehreka 2y ago
  Yeah, I feel like in general we on HN give ourselves way too much credit in terms of our ability to drive public opinion or affect purchasing/usage patterns among the public. The idea of the “nerd-led revolution” may have had some impact in the past, but I think the days of that are over. Large corporations now know what they’re doing in ways that they hadn’t figured out in the 2000s or even the early 2010s.
- sunshowers 2y ago
  The other aspect, somewhat memory-holed, was that Chrome was automatically installed as shovelware if you went to install Adobe Flash for IE or Firefox: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/23jnmy/why_is_chrome_bundled_with_flash_like_shovelware/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/23jnmy/why_is_chrom... This kind of not-freely-given consent was key to Chrome's growth.
  - badwolf 2y ago
    Chrome was bundled with so many installers. Google probably spent billions shoving Chrome into any machine they could.
    - hyperdimension 2y ago
      Tellingly, that very bundling is how Sundar got into the spotlight at Google.
- x0x0 2y ago
  Early chrome was driven by the fact that firefox was a piece of garbage. Firefox 3 was not good software, and had an unpleasant habit of totally crashing the entire browser regularly. Your only other popular choice was ie8. Also not great. Later Google's ability to buy installs and put it on google.com came into play, but for at least the first 5 years and probably longer, chrome was a far faster, more secure, and more reliable choice. They also pioneered the multi-process model to isolate different components of the browser.
Izkata 2y ago
I swear I also remember it getting included in installation wizards for unrelated software (on Windows), so people would end up with Chrome/Chromium without even realizing it.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I’ve been out of the windows game for so long I forgot all that malware that was installed by various installer engines and was so relieved when I found portable apps and oldversion.com and ninite. And now I guess there are things like chocolaty that do similar things. Switching to Mac and Linux I don’t really miss it at all
EasyMark 2y ago
Did you miss the barrage of ads for Chrome that google played for literally years on the internet and television?
- Zak 2y ago
  Yes. Thanks adblock!
icehawk 2y ago
The adoption of firefox was driven by word of mouth. I still can't search on google with them trying to shove chrome down my throat

freedomben 2y ago

Agreed on hoping this is the inflection point, but only partial agreement that it's about adblock. For sure Google wants adblock to die, but I think it goes even deeper than that. I think it's part of a much bigger trend in tech in general but also in Google: Removing user control. When you look at the "security" things they are doing, many of them have a common philosophy underpinning them that the user (aka device owner) is a security threat and must be protected against. Web integrity, Manifest v3, various DoH/DoT, bootloader locking, device integrity which conveniently makes root difficult/impossible, and more. To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in. The next generation won't have the wonderful and fertile computing environment that we enjoyed, and it's (partly) your fault.

justanotheratom 2y ago
yes, iOS now restricts Apps from getting blanket access to their contacts, photos, and even clipboard. On the one hand, it does protect the user from malicious Apps that trick users into giving blanket access. On the other hand, they could have atleast done it like location access - where user still has an option to give blanket access. It is not fair that Siri is the only one that can access these things now.
- moi2388 2y ago
  It can. You can still give apps access to all of it with a single press. And manifest v3 makes things a bit more tedious but not impossible. There are other adblockers which still function just fine
- kstrauser 2y ago
  That's literally how iOS works today. If I go into Settings > Privacy & Security > Photos, I can give apps None, Limited Access, or Full Access. Same with Contacts, same with the clipboard (where the per-app choices are Ask, Deny, or Allow). > It is not fair that Siri is the only one that can access these things now. That would be true if it was, but it isn't.
2y ago

crazygringo 2y ago

> everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective I thought I knew that. Then I switched from uBlock Origin to uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome, which is compatible with Manifest v3. I was prepared for the horrible onslaught of ads, expecting at least a quarter would start getting through, ready to switch to Firefox... ...and didn't notice a single change. Not a single ad gets through. And at the same time, loading pages feels a little faster, though I haven't measured it. Which has now got me wondering -- what if Manifest v3 really was about security and performance all along? Because if Google was using it to kill adblockers, they've made approximately 0% progress towards that goal as far as I can tell. If they really wanted to kill adblockers, they'd just, you know, kill adblockers. But they didn't at all.

moi2388 2y ago
It makes things a bit more annoying? But in v3 you can still do everything you need to do to block ads
flohofwoe 2y ago
> ...and didn't notice a single change. Not a single ad gets through. When I tried UBO Lite recently it couldn't block YouTube ads, not sure if that's impossible with Manifest V3, or if UBO Lite just isn't updated regularly like UBO to defeat the YouTube anti-ad-blocking updates. Update: looks like it's fixed now, not bad :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Youtube's adblocker-evasion and adblocker's youtube ad blocking has been a cat-and-mouse game since time immemorial.
surajrmal 2y ago
People seem to see what they want. And many seem to be blinded by Google hate and must find ways to be unhappy with all decisions they make. Google has publicly delayed v2 depreciation to ensure ad blockers worked well under v3.

moooo99 2y ago

Adblock doesn’t only make Google Chrome bearable, it makes the internet bearable. I recently uninstalled my Adblock for testing purposes. Most websites nowadays are just ads with a little bit of text in between

DataDive 2y ago

> Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Here is one empirical data point. I switched over to Firefox this morning and will advocate for it. I've considered it for a while, but I never felt motivated to make the switch. It took me a good half hour to set it up the way I like it.

heelix 2y ago
This is sort of like planting trees. I cut bait on chrome when they first announced they were dropping/impacting adblockers. For the most part, things are good enough the only time I spin up chrome is confirming something renders as expected on a personal site. Firefox works well enough for streaming and surfing.

karaterobot 2y ago

I'd like to think that's true, but I don't know, because people seem to have a very high tolerance for advertisements. Surprisingly so. I have a very low tolerance, and do what I can to get rid of them. But then, every once in a while I use someone else's computer and see how they live with them. I say "I can show you how to get rid of those ads," but they usually just don't care enough to do it. I bet the majority of people are like that—maybe the vast majority—and Google is probably making the same bet, but with even more information. My prediction is that if (God willing) Chrome loses significant market share, it'll be for some other reason than this.

kmlx 2y ago

> making adblock less effective adblocking still works just fine on Safari, which has been doing the same thing as Manifest V3 for years now.

timeon 2y ago
Ad-blockers are not just about displaying the actual ads. Does the Chrome blocks trackers even without ad-blocker Like Safari?
- kmlx 2y ago
  my adblocker on Safari blocks everything, including trackers. no idea about Chrome.

yupyupyups 2y ago

Yeah, I don't browse the web without an ad blocker.

wooque 2y ago

I'd argue it won't make a dent in Chrome market share. People who really care about this (tech minded people) are not using Chrome anyway, others (regular people) will switch to less powerful Manifest V3 adblockers that would probably be good enough and won't switch from Chrome.

throwaway48476 2y ago

So, are you going to leave chrome then?

spankalee 2y ago

What makes you say the security reasons are made up?

Zak 2y ago
I can take this question. They removed webRequestBlocking, used mainly by adblockers, but left webRequest. The security implications are the same for both, but only the former is optimized for content blocking.

ragnese 2y ago

The vast, vast, majority of normies I know use Google Chrome and use zero extensions.

mossTechnician 2y ago

I've been checking browser stat counters religiously, looking for evidence that this change is driving their numbers down. No luck so far. Am I missing any? https://gs.statcounter.com https://gs.statcounter.com https://analytics.usa.gov https://analytics.usa.gov https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Manifest v3 changes are pretty reasonable. Declarative filtering that prevents untrustworthy software from getting access to data is objectively a good thing. It's just that uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should have access to everything. Truth be told it should be literally built into the browser itself and deeply integrated with it. Only conflicts of interest prevent that. Can't trust an ad company to maintain ad blockers after all.

quotemstr 2y ago
The problem isn't the declarative filtering per se. The problem is the draconian limit on the number of filters. Given that we can compile regular expressions to DFAs and evaluate them in O(len(url)) time no matter how many patterns we have, there's little reason to place an arbitrary cap on the sophistication of an extension's filtering.
10000truths 2y ago
There was already an established solution for running untrusted code - the WebAssembly engine sandbox. Data can't be exfiltrated if imported functions are forbidden, which would be very easy to verify via static analysis of the WASM module. All of this hullabaloo about Manifest v3 could have been avoided if the Chrome team did the sane thing and exposed an API for using a WebAssembly module for filtering.