7 ms·

> Firefox is also the only browser that vets uBlock's code on every update to make sure the developer hasn't inserted spyware or malware into the extension. Th

by swed420 2mo ago

> Firefox is also the only browser that vets uBlock's code on every update to make sure the developer hasn't inserted spyware or malware into the extension. They could save themselves the trouble if Firefox simply baked in its own ad-blocking, but since Google basically owns them, we all know that will never happen. Ladybird browser is going to be awesome.

deweywsu 2mo ago
See, this is the kind of thing that makes Firefox cool. They have not only just as good of developer console tools as Chrome, they have forward thinking, truly user-oriented policies. They have had trouble in the recent past at securing funding, but something tells me their user philosophy might save them when all the others turn completely to corporate greed as their main operating mechanism (if they already haven't).
- swed420 2mo ago
  Your reply makes no sense. To the original point, if they had user-oriented policies, they'd have ad-blocking baked in by now. But they don't, and likely never will.
  - ruckcbek 2mo ago
    You're absolutely right.
  - bigbadfeline 2mo ago
    > Your reply makes no sense. To the original point, if they had user-oriented policies, they'd have ad-blocking baked in by now. It's not black and white, and your inability to see the larger context is disturbing. You could, by the same logic, criticize Mozilla for not serving you coffee which is certainly a "user-oriented policy" "baked-in" or rather "brewed-in". But we must be realistic about how far UOPs can be stretched, Mozilla is better than the rest, which includes large corps with far more money than them. If you can do better than Mozilla, I'm all ears. Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting.
    - swed420 2mo ago
      > Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting. One would hope that's one of the more useful things an LLM could assist with if not now, very soon. In the meantime, there's no reason they couldn't have uBlock kept as an extension but bundled by default like they've done with other functionality over the years. Wait, never mind. There's one rea$on why they wouldn't, and it's already been $tated.
dralley 2mo ago
Websites already can barely be assed to care about supporting Firefox users, doing adblocking by default is a great way to get websites to start putting up banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" en-masse. And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.
- swed420 2mo ago
  The level of mental gymnastics in this thread denying the extent to which companies like Google (and their puppets like Mozilla) control the internet is too damn high. Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare?
    - swed420 2mo ago
      > You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core If you want to inherit all of Firefox's flaws, I suppose. > and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare? Considering Cloudflare is a sponsor of Ladybird, something tells me they're going to grant an exception for it.
      - Larrikin 2mo ago
        What flaws exactly? People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions. I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
epihelix 2mo ago
That's like suggesting that someone using LLMs to assist coding, could save themselves the trouble by writing the code by hand. Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain. What stuns me is that most people still use browsers that cannot block ads, seem genuinely annoyed by ads, but don't want to even try switching to a browser that will easily block those ads. It's amazing how much crap people are willing to wade through when the alternative is trying something new.
- swed420 2mo ago
  > That's like suggesting that someone using LLMs to assist coding, could save themselves the trouble by writing the code by hand. No it's not. > Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain. No, quite the opposite. FF has a history of adopting extensions as baked-in functionality if they prove useful/popular enough. There are tons of examples of this from the past for various features, which is great. But that fact makes it even more absurd that they refuse to do the same for what is likely their most popular extension of all time: uBlock Origin
  - notpushkin 2mo ago
    Waterfox, a Firefox fork, has actually built a builtin qdblocker. (And yes, they do whitelist their search partner by default, but you can turn that off.) Apparently it’s faster than uBlock Origin, but there’s been problems on some websites, so I’ll be sticking with uBO for now. Edit: actually, it seems the underlying functionality was built by Mozilla themselves, just not exposed in the UI yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309020
- oblio 2mo ago
  > Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. It's been 20+ years, nobody cares about that anymore.
stubish 2mo ago
If Firefox baked in ad blocking, they would have to then deal with the financial incentive to make it worse. Sponsored ads, 'good' ads, government announcements, election propaganda... there is a slippery slope they are better off not getting on. A trusted 3rd party from the wider community seems a better option in many ways. The alternative is starting a web browser with a manifesto welded on that essentially states 'death to all advertising', and until that can be crowd funded I can't see that happening in today's world. What I am surprised about is that none of the browsers or forks have created a specialist plugin API for adblocking and maybe other filtering. Provide what is needed and only that (keeping the surface tiny), and then evolve the general purpose API in the way they need. I don't think we need V2 of the API any more, except for keeping this one absolutely critical plugin working, do we?
- elabajaba 2mo ago
  Firefox has baked in adblocking (using adblock-rust, brave's built in adblocker), but it has to be enabled through about:config and not the settings UI.
- thisislife2 2mo ago
  Both the Brave browser, and Vivaldi browser have some kind of built-in adblocking API. The makers of Brave browser even pay some of the adblocking list curators.
WorldMaker 2mo ago
Admiral and several other of the more obnoxious ad networks already claim that Firefox is an ad blocker simply because of its out-of-the-box blocking support for third-party cookies and those ad networks nag you to use another browser. If Firefox added actual ad blocking out of the box I can't imagine the havoc that would cause and how many more websites would claim that they don't work at all in Firefox.
- glenstein 2mo ago
  A sharp point in this context because yet again, Mozilla faces contradictory demands in every direction. In today's edition, they are failing their users by not hard coding the ablocking in but also they need to give up on ad blocking because if they try they'll simply be blacklisted.
  - Dylan16807 2mo ago
    "Do X." versus "Don't do X." is a set of demands faced by most programs.
  - WorldMaker 2mo ago
    From my perspective that's not a reason to give up on ad blocking if Firefox wanted to bundle that out of the box, that's another reason that the Chrome hegemony is bad for everyone and ad networks that want to block Firefox "as an ad blocker" probably deserve to die. I was just pointing out that the fears in this thread of how ad networks would react to Firefox blocking ads out of the box are already here whether or not Firefox increases its ad blocking defaults.
firefax 2mo ago
>since Google basically owns them Google has been trying to kill them since they moved the Chrome team into the same building as the now defunct SF office. (Apparently they offered people a lot of money? There are some words I could use to describe people who do things they think are unethical for cash I'll leave unsaid.)
- thisislife2 2mo ago
  Can you share your source for this?
cyberrock 2mo ago
After watching them butcher their own side tabs implementation, I don't know if we really want that, unless they're actually hiring the uBO team directly.
3371 2mo ago
People believe ublock because it's reputable and not affiliated with browsers IMO.
cuu508 2mo ago
In one of the monthly update videos Andreas mentioned that although they are working on a basic built-in adblocker for Ladybird, long-term they want extension support and the adblocking functionality to be in an extension.
- ryandrake 2mo ago
  Why does ad blocking always have to be relegated to an extension? Browsers build in so many things. Why do they all draw the line at a feature like ad blocking that every user wants?
  - happymellon 2mo ago
    Because they want a level of plausible deniability.
    - ta8903 2mo ago
      The way uBO works already provides a layer of plausible deniability. It's just a content blocker that loads filter lists maintained by other people.
      - happymellon 2mo ago
        I'm not sure if you responded to the wrong comment, but the gpp was suggesting building it in by default. If Firefox included it by default then it would remove a layer of deniability.
        ryandrake 2mo ago
        What do they need to deny? Ad blocking is clearly a feature many users want. It’s often the only extension people install. If I were Firefox, I’d build it right into the core of the engine. Turn it on with a checkbox and/or custom blocklist sources.
        2mo ago
KingMob 2mo ago
[flagged]
- glenstein 2mo ago
  Yikes, that is a twist I was not aware of.
- akimbostrawman 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ako 2mo ago
    Exactly, the German autobahn is also awesome. /s
- binarin 2mo ago
  I didn't know who Charlie Kirk was, and no facts about DHH other than him being Rails creator. "will never be awesome" is missing some quantifier about US-centricity.
  - latexr 2mo ago
    > US-centricity Andreas Kling is Swedish, DHH is Danish, fascism originated in Europe.
    - wizzwizz4 2mo ago
      Italian fascism originated in Italy, but if you broaden the definition of "fascism" to include Nazism (as Adolf Hitler did), then there's an argument that it originated in the 19th century, in many parts of the world, including the United States. Among others, Adolf Hitler took inspiration from Madison Grant, Henry Ford, and the Jim Crow laws; and the Nazi regime took inspiration from Harry Laughlin, the KKK, and American eugenics. (WWII might be a bigger contributor to eugenics going out of fashion in the US than its lack of scientific merit was.)
- lukan 2mo ago
elabajaba 2mo ago
Firefox started shipping adblock-rust in March (Brave's built in adblocker). It's not properly wired up in the UI yet but you can enable it and add filter lists in about:config.
- thisislife2 2mo ago
  I am cynical about this move - this could be used by them to cripple support for uBlock Origin eventually, to keep Google happy.
  - fhn 2mo ago
    If they cripple support for uBlock Origin, there will be no more Firefox. That's a promise.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

by swed420 2mo ago

deweywsu 2mo ago

See, this is the kind of thing that makes Firefox cool. They have not only just as good of developer console tools as Chrome, they have forward thinking, truly user-oriented policies. They have had trouble in the recent past at securing funding, but something tells me their user philosophy might save them when all the others turn completely to corporate greed as their main operating mechanism (if they already haven't).

swed420 2mo ago
Your reply makes no sense. To the original point, if they had user-oriented policies, they'd have ad-blocking baked in by now. But they don't, and likely never will.
- ruckcbek 2mo ago
  You're absolutely right.
- bigbadfeline 2mo ago
  > Your reply makes no sense. To the original point, if they had user-oriented policies, they'd have ad-blocking baked in by now. It's not black and white, and your inability to see the larger context is disturbing. You could, by the same logic, criticize Mozilla for not serving you coffee which is certainly a "user-oriented policy" "baked-in" or rather "brewed-in". But we must be realistic about how far UOPs can be stretched, Mozilla is better than the rest, which includes large corps with far more money than them. If you can do better than Mozilla, I'm all ears. Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting.
  - swed420 2mo ago
    > Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting. One would hope that's one of the more useful things an LLM could assist with if not now, very soon. In the meantime, there's no reason they couldn't have uBlock kept as an extension but bundled by default like they've done with other functionality over the years. Wait, never mind. There's one rea$on why they wouldn't, and it's already been $tated.

dralley 2mo ago

Websites already can barely be assed to care about supporting Firefox users, doing adblocking by default is a great way to get websites to start putting up banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" en-masse. And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.

swed420 2mo ago
The level of mental gymnastics in this thread denying the extent to which companies like Google (and their puppets like Mozilla) control the internet is too damn high. Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare?
  - swed420 2mo ago
    > You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core If you want to inherit all of Firefox's flaws, I suppose. > and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare? Considering Cloudflare is a sponsor of Ladybird, something tells me they're going to grant an exception for it.
    - Larrikin 2mo ago
      What flaws exactly? People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions. I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.

epihelix 2mo ago

That's like suggesting that someone using LLMs to assist coding, could save themselves the trouble by writing the code by hand. Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain. What stuns me is that most people still use browsers that cannot block ads, seem genuinely annoyed by ads, but don't want to even try switching to a browser that will easily block those ads. It's amazing how much crap people are willing to wade through when the alternative is trying something new.

swed420 2mo ago
> That's like suggesting that someone using LLMs to assist coding, could save themselves the trouble by writing the code by hand. No it's not. > Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain. No, quite the opposite. FF has a history of adopting extensions as baked-in functionality if they prove useful/popular enough. There are tons of examples of this from the past for various features, which is great. But that fact makes it even more absurd that they refuse to do the same for what is likely their most popular extension of all time: uBlock Origin
- notpushkin 2mo ago
  Waterfox, a Firefox fork, has actually built a builtin qdblocker. (And yes, they do whitelist their search partner by default, but you can turn that off.) Apparently it’s faster than uBlock Origin, but there’s been problems on some websites, so I’ll be sticking with uBO for now. Edit: actually, it seems the underlying functionality was built by Mozilla themselves, just not exposed in the UI yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309020
oblio 2mo ago
> Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. It's been 20+ years, nobody cares about that anymore.

stubish 2mo ago

If Firefox baked in ad blocking, they would have to then deal with the financial incentive to make it worse. Sponsored ads, 'good' ads, government announcements, election propaganda... there is a slippery slope they are better off not getting on. A trusted 3rd party from the wider community seems a better option in many ways. The alternative is starting a web browser with a manifesto welded on that essentially states 'death to all advertising', and until that can be crowd funded I can't see that happening in today's world. What I am surprised about is that none of the browsers or forks have created a specialist plugin API for adblocking and maybe other filtering. Provide what is needed and only that (keeping the surface tiny), and then evolve the general purpose API in the way they need. I don't think we need V2 of the API any more, except for keeping this one absolutely critical plugin working, do we?

elabajaba 2mo ago
Firefox has baked in adblocking (using adblock-rust, brave's built in adblocker), but it has to be enabled through about:config and not the settings UI.
thisislife2 2mo ago
Both the Brave browser, and Vivaldi browser have some kind of built-in adblocking API. The makers of Brave browser even pay some of the adblocking list curators.

WorldMaker 2mo ago

Admiral and several other of the more obnoxious ad networks already claim that Firefox is an ad blocker simply because of its out-of-the-box blocking support for third-party cookies and those ad networks nag you to use another browser. If Firefox added actual ad blocking out of the box I can't imagine the havoc that would cause and how many more websites would claim that they don't work at all in Firefox.

glenstein 2mo ago
A sharp point in this context because yet again, Mozilla faces contradictory demands in every direction. In today's edition, they are failing their users by not hard coding the ablocking in but also they need to give up on ad blocking because if they try they'll simply be blacklisted.
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
  "Do X." versus "Don't do X." is a set of demands faced by most programs.
- WorldMaker 2mo ago
  From my perspective that's not a reason to give up on ad blocking if Firefox wanted to bundle that out of the box, that's another reason that the Chrome hegemony is bad for everyone and ad networks that want to block Firefox "as an ad blocker" probably deserve to die. I was just pointing out that the fears in this thread of how ad networks would react to Firefox blocking ads out of the box are already here whether or not Firefox increases its ad blocking defaults.

firefax 2mo ago

>since Google basically owns them Google has been trying to kill them since they moved the Chrome team into the same building as the now defunct SF office. (Apparently they offered people a lot of money? There are some words I could use to describe people who do things they think are unethical for cash I'll leave unsaid.)

thisislife2 2mo ago
Can you share your source for this?

cyberrock 2mo ago

After watching them butcher their own side tabs implementation, I don't know if we really want that, unless they're actually hiring the uBO team directly.

3371 2mo ago

People believe ublock because it's reputable and not affiliated with browsers IMO.

cuu508 2mo ago

In one of the monthly update videos Andreas mentioned that although they are working on a basic built-in adblocker for Ladybird, long-term they want extension support and the adblocking functionality to be in an extension.

ryandrake 2mo ago
Why does ad blocking always have to be relegated to an extension? Browsers build in so many things. Why do they all draw the line at a feature like ad blocking that every user wants?
- happymellon 2mo ago
  Because they want a level of plausible deniability.
  - ta8903 2mo ago
    The way uBO works already provides a layer of plausible deniability. It's just a content blocker that loads filter lists maintained by other people.
    - happymellon 2mo ago
      I'm not sure if you responded to the wrong comment, but the gpp was suggesting building it in by default. If Firefox included it by default then it would remove a layer of deniability.
      - ryandrake 2mo ago
        What do they need to deny? Ad blocking is clearly a feature many users want. It’s often the only extension people install. If I were Firefox, I’d build it right into the core of the engine. Turn it on with a checkbox and/or custom blocklist sources.
        2mo ago

KingMob 2mo ago

[flagged]

glenstein 2mo ago
Yikes, that is a twist I was not aware of.
akimbostrawman 2mo ago
[flagged]
- ako 2mo ago
  Exactly, the German autobahn is also awesome. /s
binarin 2mo ago
I didn't know who Charlie Kirk was, and no facts about DHH other than him being Rails creator. "will never be awesome" is missing some quantifier about US-centricity.
- latexr 2mo ago
  > US-centricity Andreas Kling is Swedish, DHH is Danish, fascism originated in Europe.
  - wizzwizz4 2mo ago
    Italian fascism originated in Italy, but if you broaden the definition of "fascism" to include Nazism (as Adolf Hitler did), then there's an argument that it originated in the 19th century, in many parts of the world, including the United States. Among others, Adolf Hitler took inspiration from Madison Grant, Henry Ford, and the Jim Crow laws; and the Nazi regime took inspiration from Harry Laughlin, the KKK, and American eugenics. (WWII might be a bigger contributor to eugenics going out of fashion in the US than its lack of scientific merit was.)
lukan 2mo ago

elabajaba 2mo ago

Firefox started shipping adblock-rust in March (Brave's built in adblocker). It's not properly wired up in the UI yet but you can enable it and add filter lists in about:config.

thisislife2 2mo ago
I am cynical about this move - this could be used by them to cripple support for uBlock Origin eventually, to keep Google happy.
- fhn 2mo ago
  If they cripple support for uBlock Origin, there will be no more Firefox. That's a promise.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]