7 ms·

Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.

by JoeJonathan 10mo ago

agumonkey 10mo ago
and funnily enough uBO author didn't want any money even though he's making our lives a lot better
- immibis 10mo ago
  Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
  - the_af 10mo ago
    Not the same author.
    - soulofmischief 10mo ago
      Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard. Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris. Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
      - neltnerb 10mo ago
        I love uMatrix, but all evidence is that they stopped developing it in 2021. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.
        soulofmischief 10mo ago
        I think uMatrix is the better extension. I use it in tandem with uBO. But yeah, Raymond didn't have the resources to develop both at once and chose uBO which offered a more digestible, install-and-forget experience palatable to a wider audience. Raymond basically said uMatrix was feature complete. But there could be bugs.
      - the_af 10mo ago
        > Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard. You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
  - agumonkey 10mo ago
    Must be hard to resist letting some ads through for life changing money...
    - immibis 10mo ago
      They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead. You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
      - agumonkey 10mo ago
        lots of possible paths indeed
      - psychoslave 10mo ago
        It's like, what's someone price to commit a genocide? There are people out there, they will stubbornly refuse to engage in such a practice, no matter what amount of economical wealth is promised. It doesn't need to be rational. Rationality is not self justifying anyway. The will to help to build better societies is only marginally rational, all it takes is people with some empathy. Rationality is just better to tackle the logistic, it doesn't provide the constraints on what is deemed valuable.
- matheusmoreira 10mo ago
  I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again. Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
  - agumonkey 10mo ago
    seconded
throwaway613745 10mo ago
I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.
- 9cb14c1ec0 10mo ago
  > The web is unusable without a proper Adblock. It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
  - drfolgers 10mo ago
    Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data. There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner. It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
    - xedrac 10mo ago
      Any privacy benefits of blocking ads are incidental compared to the usability improvements it brings. I have near zero tolerance for ads.
    - cons0le 10mo ago
      uBo + tamper monkey is needed just to block popups. Adblock on brave is basically non existent compared to uBO
    - ekianjo 10mo ago
      Blocking even part of it is a win. Not sure why we should treat this as a dichotomy
  - ghssds 10mo ago
    > It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display. Imagine all the data Cloudflare vacuums.
ffuxlpff 10mo ago
I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned. However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains. Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice. I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.
- zajio1am 10mo ago
  On my desktop i use just NoScript and i do not need uBO, as almost no ad is shown without JS.
csdreamer7 10mo ago
There are a few reasons: I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it. I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue. But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.
- prmph 10mo ago
  It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.
  - subsection1h 10mo ago
    Do you use Auto Tab Discard? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
  - immibis 10mo ago
    Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.
  - heavyset_go 10mo ago
    Set `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb` and/or `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` to something you'd prefer, and confirm that `browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory` is set (I think it is by default). The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory. That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.
matheusmoreira 10mo ago
Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.
- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody. Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time. I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
  - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
    I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do. But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
    - PaulHoule 10mo ago
      (1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average (2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference (3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
    - BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
      > For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts May our new AI co-workers put those thousands into the poorhouse for shoddy worksmanship.
mancerayder 10mo ago
Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left? I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS. Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?
- eqvinox 10mo ago
  The crypto bullshit Brave was (and somehow still is) pulling is way worse than Firefox's enshittificAItion.
  - DonHopkins 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - eudamoniac 10mo ago
      Oh? I'm installing it now, thank you!
  - broken-kebab 10mo ago
    Not really. You can use Brave completely ignoring crypto side, and it won't complain.
    - EbNar 10mo ago
      the crypto stuff is completely opt-in.
  - jm4 10mo ago
    You can disable all that stuff. We used to have email clients, newsgroup clients, HTML editors, etc. built into our browsers. It used to be about creating a suite of tools to meet all your needs on the web. Since then, all that stuff just moved to web apps that you access using the browser so that's mostly all that remains. Vivaldi still has an email client available. A crypto wallet isn't the end of the world. I look at it as sort of a modern throwback to Netscape Communicator, which Brendan Eich helped create. The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool. You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.
vee-kay 10mo ago
Firefox on Android mobile is also useful because it allows extensions - especially uBlock Origin (UBO), Ghostery, No script, etc. Some mobile browsers (e.g., Samsung Internet) used to allow extensions also, but they've become crap or dropped such support, so their usage has fallen. I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari. Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.
- jrflowers 10mo ago
  >On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari. fwiw Safari on iOS does allow some extensions and uBlock Origin Lite is free in the iOS App Store.
  - legacynl 10mo ago
    ublock origin lite is the knee-capped version that is also available in chrome. I haven't tried it, but it is technically not able to block all ads.
    - selectodude 10mo ago
      I’ve found Wipr 2.0 has been able to block all ads (even YouTube) but it’s unable to hide itself so there are sites that block my ability to read them.
    - jrflowers 10mo ago
      Yep. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. Hopefully Apple expands Safari extension support in the future
    - strictnein 10mo ago
      Works much better than I thought it would. It's rather rare when I see an add in Chrome.
bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
do you have stats on how many others that is? Because I run FF and I don't run uBO, so.. I mean I understand the feeling based on one's own situation that it would kill the browser but just like Pauline Kael thinking nobody voted for Nixon so how could he win the fact that you think it would kill the browser does not mean that they are out of touch for saying they won't do it despite it bringing in money.
parliament32 10mo ago
uBO works fine in Edge too.
hirvi74 10mo ago
There is a variant of uBO working in Safari again, if that is of any interest to you. Created by the same dev and all. I've had great results with it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.

agumonkey 10mo ago

and funnily enough uBO author didn't want any money even though he's making our lives a lot better

immibis 10mo ago
Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
- the_af 10mo ago
  Not the same author.
  - soulofmischief 10mo ago
    Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard. Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris. Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
    - neltnerb 10mo ago
      I love uMatrix, but all evidence is that they stopped developing it in 2021. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.
      - soulofmischief 10mo ago
        I think uMatrix is the better extension. I use it in tandem with uBO. But yeah, Raymond didn't have the resources to develop both at once and chose uBO which offered a more digestible, install-and-forget experience palatable to a wider audience. Raymond basically said uMatrix was feature complete. But there could be bugs.
    - the_af 10mo ago
      > Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard. You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.
- agumonkey 10mo ago
  Must be hard to resist letting some ads through for life changing money...
  - immibis 10mo ago
    They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead. You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.
    - agumonkey 10mo ago
      lots of possible paths indeed
    - psychoslave 10mo ago
      It's like, what's someone price to commit a genocide? There are people out there, they will stubbornly refuse to engage in such a practice, no matter what amount of economical wealth is promised. It doesn't need to be rational. Rationality is not self justifying anyway. The will to help to build better societies is only marginally rational, all it takes is people with some empathy. Rationality is just better to tackle the logistic, it doesn't provide the constraints on what is deemed valuable.
matheusmoreira 10mo ago
I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again. Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!
- agumonkey 10mo ago
  seconded

throwaway613745 10mo ago

I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.

9cb14c1ec0 10mo ago
> The web is unusable without a proper Adblock. It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.
- drfolgers 10mo ago
  Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data. There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner. It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.
  - xedrac 10mo ago
    Any privacy benefits of blocking ads are incidental compared to the usability improvements it brings. I have near zero tolerance for ads.
  - cons0le 10mo ago
    uBo + tamper monkey is needed just to block popups. Adblock on brave is basically non existent compared to uBO
  - ekianjo 10mo ago
    Blocking even part of it is a win. Not sure why we should treat this as a dichotomy
- ghssds 10mo ago
  > It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display. Imagine all the data Cloudflare vacuums.

ffuxlpff 10mo ago

I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned. However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains. Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice. I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/ium) and combined with a good updated blocklist in /etc/hosts or like it would provide most of the functionality of an adblock.

zajio1am 10mo ago
On my desktop i use just NoScript and i do not need uBO, as almost no ad is shown without JS.

csdreamer7 10mo ago

There are a few reasons: I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it. I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue. But Mozilla has been doing odd things that makes me question them. I would move to some Chromium based browser if ublock origin was... blocked... pun intended... because the web does prefer Chrome over Firefox. If this 3rd party browser is able to integrate some of the functionality of ublock origin that Firefox chose to remove; I would use it over the reasons I listed above in a heartbeat.

prmph 10mo ago
It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.
- subsection1h 10mo ago
  Do you use Auto Tab Discard? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
- immibis 10mo ago
  Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.
- heavyset_go 10mo ago
  Set `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb` and/or `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` to something you'd prefer, and confirm that `browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory` is set (I think it is by default). The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory. That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.

matheusmoreira 10mo ago

Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.

PaulHoule 10mo ago
I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody. Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time. I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away than it really will be a "niche browser that nobody tests"
- matheusmoreira 10mo ago
  I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do. But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.
  - PaulHoule 10mo ago
    (1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average (2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference (3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.
  - BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
    > For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts May our new AI co-workers put those thousands into the poorhouse for shoddy worksmanship.

mancerayder 10mo ago

Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left? I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS. Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?

eqvinox 10mo ago
The crypto bullshit Brave was (and somehow still is) pulling is way worse than Firefox's enshittificAItion.
- DonHopkins 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - eudamoniac 10mo ago
    Oh? I'm installing it now, thank you!
- broken-kebab 10mo ago
  Not really. You can use Brave completely ignoring crypto side, and it won't complain.
  - EbNar 10mo ago
    the crypto stuff is completely opt-in.
- jm4 10mo ago
  You can disable all that stuff. We used to have email clients, newsgroup clients, HTML editors, etc. built into our browsers. It used to be about creating a suite of tools to meet all your needs on the web. Since then, all that stuff just moved to web apps that you access using the browser so that's mostly all that remains. Vivaldi still has an email client available. A crypto wallet isn't the end of the world. I look at it as sort of a modern throwback to Netscape Communicator, which Brendan Eich helped create. The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool. You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.

vee-kay 10mo ago

Firefox on Android mobile is also useful because it allows extensions - especially uBlock Origin (UBO), Ghostery, No script, etc. Some mobile browsers (e.g., Samsung Internet) used to allow extensions also, but they've become crap or dropped such support, so their usage has fallen. I like Firefox (for safety) and Vivaldi (Chromium browser, it's easier to use) on Android mobile. On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari. Ever since Google moved to Manifest v3, Chrome is a no go.

jrflowers 10mo ago
>On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari. fwiw Safari on iOS does allow some extensions and uBlock Origin Lite is free in the iOS App Store.
- legacynl 10mo ago
  ublock origin lite is the knee-capped version that is also available in chrome. I haven't tried it, but it is technically not able to block all ads.
  - selectodude 10mo ago
    I’ve found Wipr 2.0 has been able to block all ads (even YouTube) but it’s unable to hide itself so there are sites that block my ability to read them.
  - jrflowers 10mo ago
    Yep. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. Hopefully Apple expands Safari extension support in the future
  - strictnein 10mo ago
    Works much better than I thought it would. It's rather rare when I see an add in Chrome.

bryanrasmussen 10mo ago

do you have stats on how many others that is? Because I run FF and I don't run uBO, so.. I mean I understand the feeling based on one's own situation that it would kill the browser but just like Pauline Kael thinking nobody voted for Nixon so how could he win the fact that you think it would kill the browser does not mean that they are out of touch for saying they won't do it despite it bringing in money.

parliament32 10mo ago

uBO works fine in Edge too.

hirvi74 10mo ago

There is a variant of uBO working in Safari again, if that is of any interest to you. Created by the same dev and all. I've had great results with it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...