Google Chrome's next update will mark the end of popular ad blockers
3 days ago by lemmydividebyzero to c/technology
I think that the concern is whether a number of websites might stop working with Firefox if Chrome users consistently represent ad revenue and Firefox users generally don't.
I use Firefox, but it has relatively-limited marketshare in 2026. A lot of people just browse on mobile devices and on Android devices, and there Chrome's probably the default browser.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/
Chrome at 70.25%.
Safari at 15.72%.
Edge at 5.14%.
Firefox at 2.19%.
Yeah, that's true. But...if a website derives its revenue from ads, a non-ad-viewing user --- and users who switch browsers so as to use an ad blocker would presumably be blocking ads --- loses that website money rather than generating it. Like, for such a website, the issue would be how many Firefox users that do view ads would be lost if their website didn't work on Firefox.
Those of you who remember the early 2000s, when Internet Explorer had very high marketshare, probably remember a number of websites that didn't work with other browsers.
Google is already killing the ad revenue model of the web by presenting the content it scrapes with AI for search — effectively stealing their content for profit — instead of ranking links so users navigate to their sites. Many have ahead seen a 70-90% drop in traffic, resulting in a 70-90% drop in ad revenue.
Capitalism is a blast, huh? Crime is very legal and very cool!
Broad rule of thumb for me:
If your website needs ad revenue to either exist, or that's fundamentally its entire business model?
That website does not need to exist.
Now sure, are their caveats to this? Yes. But broadly, its usually true. The website should exist as a small loss leading part of your whole shebang, or should have some kind of membership or donation model or something else, to fund itself.
Its also not that hard to make a website follow broswer agnostic standards. If the website can't figure out how to do that, if they think its fine to be a browser-vendor exclusive website, I don't need to use it.
Because people weren't testing to work on the various browsers, which is pretty much what happens now with many sites and Firefox. People don't adhere to the webstandard so Firefox doesn't always work, but if we see a huge surge in Firefox then websites might put effort into them working in hope to catch some revenue of oerson doesnt have a blocker
Useragent Detection - Your Current Useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/149.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
Browser userAgentData HighEntropyValues: { "platform": "Android", "platformVersion": "10.0.0", "mobile": true, "model": "K" }
Browser Name: Chrome
Browser Version: for Android
OS: Android 10.0
Hardware Vendor: Unknown
Hardware Model: Unknown
Screen Width:
Screen Height:
Is it a desktop device: No
Is it a mobile device: Yes
Is it a tablet: No
Is it a crawler/robot: No
Is it a console: No
That's what is returned by their browser detection tool for Vanadium on graphene.
Cromite is even more privacy oriented, returning
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
{ "platform": "Android" }
Browser Name: Chrome
Browser Version: for Android
OS: Android 10.0
Hardware Vendor: Unknown
Hardware Model: Unknown
Their stats combine ALL versions of chrome (chromium) which would also include things like cromite, degoogled chrome, cromium itself, possibly vivaldi, apps that use webview (doordash, voyager for lemmy, bank apps, etc) might even be included as they are chrome/chromium on android, would all tally for chrome with no differentiation even though some versions are light years apart.
Cromite/vanadium and chrome are the same browssrs the way chocolate and vanilla are the same ice cream.
Oh, and to muddle things some more, on Android, viewing using desktop site gives this:
Browser Name: Chrome
Browser Version: 148.0
OS: Linux 0
Is it a desktop device: Yes
Just use an agent switcher. That will take care of non browser API checks at least.
If that happens, Google becomes a monopoly, if it isn't already. They don't want this (or at least they haven't, but they might think it won't matter now). If they continue wanting Firefox to be relevant to help their argument that they aren't a monopoly, they'll do what they can to ensure Firefox continues to work.
Or Google thinks all the other illegal crap they routinely get away with is a leading sign that they will also get away with becoming a monopoly...
And If sites start trying to block Firefox, we work around it. User-Agent is still malleable.
the last thing google wants is people to flee to APPLE, and thier webkit browser. i think its one of the reasons they allow firefox to be on life support, despite the anti-trust issues, which never affected them anyways.
So use Firefox! On Android its ad blockers work well too
The fact there's extentions on FF & it's forks for mobile makes me sooo blown away anyone ever choses anything else!
Agree - I just don’t understand why you’d use anything else on a PC.
100% It's just somehow way more blatant for me with mobile as it's BEEN like this... which propbably helped make Google more confident in doing the same thing with PCs 🤯
mobile has forks and adblockers. you can even use brave if you want. ironfox is one firefox, but i stopped using it, because it does something wierd with different websites, and and on reddit where i browse sparingly.
There are mobile clients of Firefox and related forks, FYI, not just on PC. Firefox and Fennec are probably the most popular on Android.
The forks of Firefox are just as good or better, and largely lack the AI bullshit.
Firefox is my go-to browser, but don't trust Mozilla and be ready to switch to an alternative just in case Firefox gets enshittified too much.
well except in the worst OS ever, iOS, where you can only use the worst web standards compliant webengine for vague security reasons, you know, to keep you safe from yourself
You don’t like the OS; ok. Nobody likes the forced usage of the engine. But WebKit being the “worst web standards compliant” is simply not true. It’s maybe the highest on interop and certainly competitive in other ways. I wish there were more WebKit and Gecko; way too much Blink right now. Come on Ladybird and Servo.
Check out Orion browser—it has support for uBlock and other extensions
"But my cousin told me the fox fire is used by hackers or something, and the Google one said it was faster."
I shit you not, I used to work for a company (with no IT dept btw) that refused to use Firefox because they said it was "a trojan virus."
What I think happened is one of their dipshit employees downloaded something they shouldn't have and got a virus and the bosses blamed the browser.
okay sit down this one is going to take a lot of brain. if a lot of hackers use it, the people who are good at computers, right? why would you not use the one that hackers use?
non tech savy ppl just go with the default.
In pretty much all of life, the most consistent thing I've learned is that if it's default anything, that off rip should make you reassess it
i mean i dunno. the instrument i specialize in, there are three manufacturers. there's the default, the cheap, and the expensive. the default is legitimately better than the expensive.
They still need tab groups.
most "regular users" dont know about the forks, or even extensions.
The other thing people on Lemmy / Hackernews/ Reddit don't seem to get is that people are not using laptop or desktop computers anymore. More and more people only have a phone and maybe a tablet. People with phones and tablets do not know what a browser is. It's baked into the system. Everyone on Android is using Chrome and they very likely don't even know it.
I use Ecosia on my phone because it has a built-in ad blocker that actually works.
I use Revanced instead of YouTube/Music so I don't get ads and can listen to what I want (I had to change my phone's DNS, because on data it wouldn't let me watch or listen to anything that was marked "explicit").
I haven't updated my Discord app in the last couple years because I heard that one of those updates supposedly introduced ads and I said "hell no."
I suggest to install Aliucord for Discord and Metrolist for YT music
You mean those people that were born in the digital age so that it's second nature to them?
Their absolute and stubborn refusal to implement PWA made me give up on Firefox recently.
I tried using Chrome for PWA only and using Firefox for my main browser for a while (to help their market share), but it made it very difficult because external links would open in Chrome.
I've found like 80% of sites I use are self hosted so I found it easier to just stop using websites with ads than dealing with Firefox 😞
All this over running web sites as apps? Why would I ever want a website as an app?
If I understand what you are saying correctly.
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials to sensitive websites.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we've passed the threshold where that's no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don't have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites' (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They're basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they're spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it's very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:
- Use Chromium fork to get security and convenience and privacy.
- Use Firefox (or its forks) to maybe get privacy at the expense of the other two.
That's an interesting take. But you think its safer to use web versions? Sending your data out somewhere else? To keep tabs isolated in firefox I do use containers, so they dont interact, but I have never been a fan of making WPA's, when I could just click on the tab its in or open it in the browser anyways.
PWA? Poopy Wet Ass? I know nothing about computing what is PWA
Progressive Web Apps, a crack-pipe idea that allows you to install websites as if they were computer applications. Desktop entries, shortcuts, opens as a single window with no URL bar, everything to make it look like a computer application, but it isn’t. It didn’t take off because it’s not a very good idea, with no very good implementations. In my opinion.
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we've passed the threshold where that's no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don't have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites' (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They're basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they're spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it's very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:
- Use Chromium fork to get security and convenience and privacy.
- Use Firefox (or its forks) to maybe get privacy at the expense of the other two.
It already has.
This is misleading.
UBlock has been deprecated on Chrome, for a long time. UBlock Lite is its replacement and will continue to function (albeit with more limited efficacy).
What they are talking about is a complicated series of command line flags to re-enable Manifest V2+installing UBlock from source… But who in their right mind would still be using vanilla Google Chrome and jumping through all those hoops?
It will be an issue for forks like Helium or Ungoogled Chromium. They’ll just have to patch in a native blocker, I suppose.
TL;DR: Headline is wrong.
Chrome users will notice nothing. The end happened a long time ago.
Firefox users:
Fuck google. Get Firefox.
LibreWolf!
Tchaikovsky!
This one rules!
Edit: Here's the F-Droid repo for IronFox, it and it's predecessor Mull have always been Librewolf mobile to me
Bullshit, there are other, better browsers who do not intentionally break basic security features like ad blocking. Switch to Firefox and Ublock Origin or any of the many forks it has.
If you are using Chrome, Brave, or similar, you should stop using it and switch to something that isn't shit. Ads are a major attack vector for malware and scams. If you are not blocking them already , you need to start immediately!
I've been using it for years too. Can recommend.
I never said that was the reason, Brave sucks because of shit like AI, trying to sneak in redirects that send money to the devs, charging to get rid of unwanted features, etc.
It'll mark the end of Chrome for anyone who gives a shit about their privacy.
It'll mark the end of chrome for anyone that wants to use a website without 2/3 of it being filled with ads and slowing tons crawl because of all the invasive scripts
Chrome is the modern day IE. We use it for work, but not much else.
Why use anything from google? They’re an advertising company.
It baffles me. I told my dad I can get him adfree youtube in just 5 minutes if I install firefox on his phone.
His response was that he doesn't want to install "yet another app" as if it's a big deal.
I'm so often left speechless by this stuff. It's asinine.
Eat your ad slop then... Wtf else can I say...
They don't want to be bothered learning something new, they'll just stick to what works for them.
Learning what? There's no learning involved, unless you count pressing a different app icon and typing in youtube in search as "learning".
And in the specific case of my dad, he's no tech illiterate. He has Linux Mint on his laptop. He can get by just fine. He's just really fucking lazy with this stuff.
I can understand that.
I'm an early Xer, and my mom an early boomer. She's been a computer user since the late 70s. Right now, She does all these things, install a bajillion apps for things like the BBC and 10 other news services even though I have explained to her that she could have them all as bookmarks in FF, with ad and tracker blocking, etc.
She understands it. She does, but at her age she can't be arsed to open a website, bookmark it, then go to bookmarks, etc. I've even tried to get her to turn things into PWAs, which she gets ! But can't be arsed.
I'm an IT guy, the eternal tech support for friends and family. Now my eldest son is an analyst at a major telco, and I send him all the traffic, and sometimes even ask him to do or figure out stuff for me, because I can't be arsed. Same reasons I've been on Mint for a few years, until I discovered CachyOS. I started my Linux journey in Slackware, painfully downloaded as diskette images, and have been distro hopping all my life, using all major distros at one time or another. Now I can't be arsed.
Im still a tinkerer, a maker, homelabber, etc. but the mundane, I can't be arsed.
Librewolf
You might not know, but you can say "crap" on the internet.
Nice!
- xrap!
- crat!
- crraaaab!
Well, I'll keep practicing.
crraaaab!
i have chosen. this is your fault. my wife blames youuuU!
I used to manage software that needed to be tested in all 3 major browsers every time we had an issue, and that was the only reason Chrome was even in my work PC. I moved on from that position, so bye bye Chrome
Chrome is in a similar position that IE used to be. It uses its majority position to move web development away from standards and so devs need to write extra code to support both chrome and others - or make chrome only sites.
It was often. Curiously enough, more often than Edge
Firefox. Zen Browser. Waterfox. Anything other fork! They’re all different flavors of perfectly fine alternatives.
Vivaldi even if you have a website that forces Chrome down your gullet.
Just keep telling your non-nerd friends that more and worse ads aren’t something they need to tolerate.
Sounds like chrome gonna lose a bunch of subscribers because fuck that
Spent the last couple weeks moving my stuff off Chrome. Not convenient but well worth the effort. If you're not on Chrome they're doing us a favor. Sites will be less likely to target ad blockers if the majority of users don't have them installed.
But the majority of users don't have them installed. Plus Google is pushing Manifest v3 with intent. They aren't content with most. They want everyone to stop using them.
people are still using it?
Chrome is shit pushed by a monopoly, exactly like Internet Explorer used to be.
Anyone who ever adopted Chrome was a fool, anyone who still uses it is an even bigger fool.
Chrome is not working for the freedom of the Internet, only open source web browsers can claim that.
If you are not using an open source web browser, you are undermining the freedom and value of the internet.
they want a walled garden much like apple has.
What will all the chrome users do?
Continue to suck on the poisoned fruit.
Just switch to Brave or Firefox, it's simple
Eh, Brave is good enough after you disable all the bloatware. The search engine is also good. It is my second browser after WebLibre (Gecko browser built from scratch)
Brave is bullshit Malware.
Use Vivaldi.
Made by the people who made the original Opera.
Hyper customizable, ad, tracking, and pop-up blocker by default.
I've been a Firefox user since the days of mosaic. I used the original Opera for years, coming back to FF when Opera was bought by the Chinese. While I still have FF as my main browser, I'm now finding myself using Vivaldi about 50% of the time. Damn good.
Use Vivaldi.
also chrome-based, unfortunately
I disagree, because they'll eventually cave in and deprecate manifest v2, then you'll have to do without adblockers on vivaldi too
I don't know if it would, necessarily. So many alternatives are chrome-based, and part of the reason google was able to accrue that share to begin with was by putting a "get chrome now" in the corner of every search you did.
Most alternatives don't have that same kind of advertising reach to displace chrome, especially not for casual users.
Whatever. Fuck you Pichai.
It hasn't stopped them in the past when it broke it on YT.
so i'm closer to script kiddie than programmer. haven't we been being told this with every update?
Yes and no.
What you got so far was the warning that this is gonna happen. Now, it happens.
thanks. the last time tech was my field was... 2006? i'm happy to keep it a hobby.
Ublock Lite will still work
Same. I have Firefox with ublock Origin on it right next to Chrome. If I need to visit some third party site I use Firefox. Occasionally I forget I’m in chrome and visit a third party site that’s chock full of ads. When that happens I immediately close the page in Chrome and jump to Firefox for a more reasonable experience.
Ublock Lite works just fine for me
Remove the groove where face goes scoob
That nickel, Odin dis range according to up
Doors footage towards the recondition dot
This gives ride to pertercother plot I shots!
They're for people who like to dig through poop, not just look at it
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They'll continue to work just fine in Firefox.
save