6mo ago

Google dropping ublock origin represents a flawless David vs Goliath victory for its developer

55 comments

Switch to firefox
- Never stopped using it in the first place. :)
- what's this from?
- These guys are the real winners in all this
- No.
  
  Then feel free to suffer from and be manipulated by targeted advertisement.
- Which we’ll soon be a paid browser if the US breaks up Google and they can’t send any money to Firefox anymore.
  
  You may want to educate yourself before spreading unnecessary FUD. Firefox is free and open source, and always has been. There's no danger in Firefox becoming a paid browser because even if they tried, it would just be forked and maintained by another community or group.
  Mozilla does have a for-profit arm called the Mozilla Corporation, and they manage the money received from Google and others. But that doesn't mean Firefox is going to become paid even if Google gets broken up by the antitrust efforts of the US government.
  
  Although thats probably not whats going to happen if google gets broken up but I‘ll still happily pay for firefox just for the sake of breaking up google.
  Death to megacorporations.
  
  honestly? Id pay for it
  
  This might be a best case scenario. It won’t happen, Mozilla has been turned into a corporate funds receiver for years. That CEO compensation doesn’t pay for itself. Imagine paying for actual software engineering work.
  
  Eh, I would think that if they're under fire for being a monopoly any non monopolistic actions like funding their rivals will be pretty well received.
  
  worst case scenario, I download a pirated copy ¯(ツ)_/¯ (though before that i'll prob. just switch to LibreWolf)

You gotta explain this one, that parable doesn't fit the situation in the way it's typically used
- This is clearly about all the youtube advertisement changes lately. (though maybe with a dolllop of not being happy about their other ads being blocked either) I've not seen a single one on FF with Ublock, no slowdown, no nothing. He was (as I understand it) making changes as needed to stay ahead of or abreast of them. (I already wasn't using their browser long before this.)
  He beat them. They didn't crush him with their technical prowess and all their genius engineers, they didn't find a way to legally challenge him (I'm sure they had their lawyers working on it), they didn't find a way to outmaneuver him, the only thing they could do is ban his extension from being used on their browser. Because they literally could not force their shit down our throats as long as we were using it.
  So I guess, maybe not a beat for beat fit for the parable, but he's very much the little guy, and they very much are the gigantic IT megacorp, so I think it was a glorious victory.
  
  I'd call it a pyrrhic victory at best. It's like if Ukraine got Russia to use their nukes on them and there was no response from the rest of the world. Sure, you got them to use their strongest weapon, but you still got nuked and they'll continue as usual.
  
  Manifest V3 was well on its way to being implemented before the aggressive youtube advertisement push. It was well known (to people who cared) it would kill uBlock back in 2019.
  Here's an article:
  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/google-begins-testing-extension-manifest-v3-in-chrome-canary/
  Discussion on the uBlock subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/dunod2/google_begins_testing_extension_manifest_v3_which/
  
  You're kind of assuming people will stop using Chrome as a consequence, but i just don't think that's the case.
  David didn't slay Goliath, Goliath just walked away and took command of David's army, leaving David to play with his rocks.
  
  Fair enough :)
  Thanks for your perspective and time in the response

Everyone keeps talking about switching to Firefox when Vivaldi is right there. It's chrome without Google's shitty practices.
- Still chromium at the end of the day. Anything they have control over has the potential to be ruined by them. Don't give them the chance, just fix the problem and use Firefox.
  
  I mean, Vivaldi absorbs whatever changes they like from Chromium, but it's not whole cloth. Vivaldi is specifically not implementing V3 and maintaining compatibility with existing addons.
- According to their blog they will stop supporting v2 next year.
  "We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code."
  
  Thats not "will stop", that's "may stop if it becomes unsupportable". Google would have to be activly adding code that fucks with V2 support in order to make it impossible to support it. It's not gone until it's gone.
  Meanwhile, in Firefox land, they had no external pressure, and continuously removed features the users wanted, despite outcry from those users.
  Is Firefox the better option just because its not Chromium based? That's not clear. What is clear to me is that I don't particularly trust Google OR Mozilla to do the right thing, and (despite using Chromium as a basis for their browser), Vivaldi is doing everything I'd want a dev to do. I wouldn't put it past them to stop taking updates from the main Chromium repo and just start doing their own thing (if Chromium becomes too much of a pain to deal with).
  People are complaining that having a mono-browesr is a problem, and I don't disagree, but Google and Mozilla are both assholes that don't listen to their users. Maybe we should be paying more attention to that than which codebase they use.

55 comments