3 ms·
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a sel
by hx8 25d ago
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?
- chr-s 25d agoI'm using Safari w/ AdGuard and it seems to work OK.
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- Mashimo 25d agouBlock lite is enough for me. I switched from normal to lite and did not notice a difference.
- bluebarbet 25d agoWith this attitude you can expect uBlock Ultra-Lite and then uBlock Nothing in future. Mozilla is the only remaining obstacle to stop big tech from deciding everything about how the web is rendered. If we don't support Firefox we will get what we deserve.
- Mashimo 25d agoMight be, but I can't take on every battle. I switched from chrome to vivaldi in the hopes of they would keep the v2 api alive. They could not. Currently I can't be asked to switch browser again. Maybe at some point. But OP asked if "is this not enough of a selling point" and I wanted to answer that honestly.
- cube00 25d agoJust wait until Manifest V4 then Manifest V5.
- nickthegreek 25d agothe difference is you are being tracked but not seeing the ads. that’s what you lost when they sunset mv2 for mv3.
- khriss 25d agoIf that's enough for you, then by all means use Chrome.
- Mashimo 25d agoYeah, it's what I do. I use Vivaldi.
- tim333 24d agoI was going to say the same - I haven't noticed any deterioration switching to lite. The user interface is a bit different which took getting used to but I think I now prefer the one in lite.
- TimTheTinker 25d agouBlock Origin (non-lite) only works on Firefox as far as I know. Brave purportedly has a built-in ad blocker that uses the same lists, but I can't vouch for it personally.
- sumanep 25d agoI use it in Opera without issues
- culi 25d agoBrave maintains its own fork of uBlock Origin for Chromium and hosts it on its own servers but they themselves have admitted they're unsure how long this state of affairs can go on for. Their built-in adblock is quite good but still not nearly as sophisticated as uBO which intelligently intercepts and modifies requests from advertisers to stop tracking. uBO is much more than an adblock tbh
- senfiaj 25d agoYeah, and when you think about the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine, we are very unlikely to see a new browser engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-browser-with-a-completely-new-engine https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if a browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
- TimTheTinker 25d agoLadybird is steadily progressing: https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/
- cyberax 25d agoThe last time I checked the source code, it was filled with horrible unsafe C++. They also re-implement everything whether it is needed or not.
- dieortin 25d agoAren’t Chrome and Firefox also filled with “horrible unsafe C++”?
- cyberax 25d agoYup. But they had thousands of engineers working on them for a decade.
- unloader6118 25d agoDoesnt that makes it even less consistent ?
- 24d ago
- mhitza 25d agoBrave's adblocker does a good job. As far as I know Firefox started using some of the Rust written components of that engine. Interestingly on fingerprinting test websites, Brave also did significantly better than Firefox + PrivacyBadger + ublock Origin + one or two more which I forgot. When I ran some tests a couple months back.
- andai 25d agoFirefox was slow on my computer (old Thinkpad). I tried using Degoogled Chromium but it kept crashing. So the closest thing for me (Chrome minus Google) was Brave. Vivaldi is cool (I loved Opera 20 years ago) but very laggy on my machine. (They did the UI in JavaScript or something.) I use both now (Brave and Firefox), when I want to use a second account. And Firefox scrolls PDFs more smoothly. (But Chrome-based browsers have sharper text rendering in PDFs! Can't win 'em all!) I like that they both have vertical tabs now.
- kiney 24d agofirefox container tabs are great for multiple accounts with the same webpage
- cute_boi 25d agoTo me helium the best browser right now.
- dartharva 24d agoBrave is nowhere near as snappy as Chrome and Firefox with all its bloat.
- cromka 25d agoBrave is even better since the ad engine is actually built in (lower level) and written in Rust if memory serves me well. And before anyone says anything about crypto: pay a small fee for Brave Origin or use it for free on Linux.
- bigyabai 25d ago> pay a small fee for Brave Origin "Hey, we recognize that normal Brave is exploitative and user-hostile by default. We'll fix it if you pay us $59.99 in mutual acknowledgement that you're a chump who can't install UBO." I'm glad (and unsurprised) that Brave's vision for the web never hit the big leagues.
- PKop 25d agoIt's not their "vision for the web" it's just an attempt at funding development of the browser given they aren't an ad-network behemoth like Google. Like Kagi charging for their search engine, a company charging money directly for the product is a good idea all things considered. How do you expect them to pay their developers?
- bigyabai 25d ago> How do you expect them to pay their developers? Ethically, for one. I'll be fucked if you expect me to "donate" to a browser that thinks my friends and family deserve a lower-quality browser experience.
- PKop 24d agoThey crypto payments for ads mechanism isn't enabled by default. Charging money directly is a way to avoid all of this so should be supported by people seeking "ethical" ways to fund development. What is lower quality about Brave's experience? Their built in ad blocker is great, certainly not low quality. Google pays Mozilla something like $400 million a year. So what browser do you use that you claim is ethical, and what exactly is the ethical method to fund development which you haven't actually defined? Origin, like Kagi, seems the best way to do it imo.
- curt15 25d agoThis remains true: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
- cm2187 25d agoAgree, and not just that, it allows to escape the hijack of your right click (something google does not tolerate), but they also degraded a lot the experience the last year or two. Number of modal dialog boxes every time it updates (and of course repeat for how many machines you use), also every time there is a pending update, the performance seems to degrade until you close and update, and those updates are very frequent. I don't know if it is my machine but it seems to be struggling when there is more than 2 or 3 video streams on different tabs (increasingly common now that every news websites seems compelled to live stream video on their front page whether you want it or not).
- notafox 25d agoYou may restrict updates in policies.json[1][2]: { "policies": { "AppUpdateURL": "http://127.0.0.1/", "DisableAppUpdate": true, "DisableFirefoxStudies": true, "DisableSystemAddonUpdate": true, "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true, "ExtensionUpdate": false, } } Syntax should be slightly different for Windows. File should be located in $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR/distribution/ $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR is the installation directory for firefox, which (for default setup) probably will be printed by this: sed -nE 's/^\s*exec (.*\/)firefox .*/\1/p' $(which firefox) # and it's probably /usr/lib/firefox When you decide to update you may temporarily replace policy for permissive one, or you may just install new version in a separate $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR. [1] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/guides/policies-configuration/ https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/guides/policies-confi... [2] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/ https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/
- gblargg 25d agoEven better, I switched to the esr release. It gets updates every week or two, but only for security issues. Otherwise the browser has a stable feature set and no new features.
- fleebee 25d agoI got very annoyed by the pending update pop-ups and the "Restart to keep using Firefox" messages when I opened new tabs, so I switched over to Librewolf and now I get no distracting modals at all and can update it precisely when I feel like it.
- cube00 25d agoSome people seem to enjoy ads, maybe they feel like they'll be first to know about the next hot thing. Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real. Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
- andrew_lettuce 25d agoOccasionally see someone go to yt without ad blocking and I'm blown away, feels like I'm from the 1800's sitting with someone in rush hour traffic - what is going on?
- broken-kebab 25d agoFew month after I started using bare Chromium instead of Brave, and consequently started to see ads, they often felt like a cool joke. I even had an occasional urge to share it with colleagues, like "Look, what they are showing me, haha" But novelty faded, and they became nuisance again.
- kevinmgranger 25d agoI've heard good things about Orion (WebKit)
- MrDrMcCoy 25d agoIt's still unusable on Linux, but I like where it's going.
- krnrrr 20d agoi try to use it as my second browser (just to see whether it could be the first one). and the only thing that keeps me off - not all extensions are supported _at full fledge_. e.g. surfingkeys (for vim-mode) which i've been using pre-dominantly for many-many years in FF. apart from that i love the experience. it's a great browser and i'm looking forward for it to keep up with the counterparts.
- happytoexplain 25d agoOnly? No. Best? Yes, it's not even close. I got the Chrome extension that adds the "Open in Firefox" option to the hyperlink right-click menu. That's how I view all YouTube videos. I'd switch completely to Firefox except for all my data being on Google. It's clear that eventually I will switch to Firefox completely. Google is pure evil.
- MrDrMcCoy 25d agoWhy not migrate your data off? As far as browser stuff goes, it's not that hard of a switch.
- happytoexplain 25d agoLaziness. Also I swear YouTube runs much worse on FF. But that's secondary.
- grebc 25d agoNoScript works well enough just wholesale blocking js.
- MrDrMcCoy 25d agoBrave's adblocker is pretty good, but their means of syncing browsers has kept me away.
- bikelang 25d agoI’ve never been enough of a uBO power user to say conclusively - but I am extremely satisfied with Brave - in particular its ad blocking on YouTube. I also think Brave is by far the best ad block available on iOS.
- Cider9986 25d agoBrave has a quality ad blocker without mv2 but they also support uBlock origin
- MBCook 25d agoSafari and 1Blocker works fine for me.
- pynappo 25d agoFrom my POV, an adblocker's perceived quality is primarily weighted on whether it can block visible ads without impacting performance. While uBO on firefox is a more capable blocker, I honestly don't browse enough sites to know one where uBOL provides a worse experience in this metric than uBO. I prefer vivaldi's UX to firefox enough that i am willing to settle for technically-worse adblocking. If I notice this becoming practically-worse, I will consider switching.
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- christophilus 25d agoI’m happy with Brave’s ad blocker. That said, I use Firefox on my desktop machines. It’s a great browser.
- zamadatix 25d agoFirefox probably has the best support of the best ad blocker (uBO), which is really nice in a lot of ways, but whether or not that means it can be the only "quality" one is completely subjective. Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker, let alone debate the differences between the top implementations.
- emacdona 25d ago> Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker I hate that you are right about this :-) It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not. She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker. I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
- unloader6118 25d ago> I hate that you are right about this :-) I love this. Many ADs are blockable because they don't care adblocker. If everybody use an Adblocker, they will come up with something even harder to block. This is engineering time arm race.
- nosioptar 25d agoQutebrowser's ad blocking got much better than it used to be. It's not as good as ubo though.
- fizwidget 24d agoPeople say this, but seeing ads is very rare for me with AdGuard on Safari. I’ve no doubt that it’s technically less comprehensive than the best Firefox ad blockers, but in practice it feels more than “good enough” for me. I imagine others feel the same?
- faizmokh 24d agoFor me I just enabled the built-in privacy feature and uBlock Origin. Haven't see any ads so far. Only downside is I keep getting Google Recaptcha so I have to switch to DDG.
- Genwald 24d agoI wonder how true this is now. I believe the functionality in MV3 has increased since it was released. There's still filters that can't be supported, but it seems like most are. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)#filtering-capabilities-which-cant-be-ported-to-mv3 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/blob/main/chromium/log.txt https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/blob/main/chromium... From "ublock-filters" only 1 filter was unsupported and 90 had unsupported domains dropped out of 10436. From "easylist" 18 out of 56109 filters are unsupported, no unsupported domains. I'm sticking with uBlock-Origin, but not sure how much of a difference it makes these days.
- eviks 24d agoYes, you're incorrect. The mentioned Vivaldi has one (and ublock still works). Brave has one. And even with ublock light you get high enough quality that other bad design decisions of Firefox kill the selling point of a better ad blocker