Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise Both uBlock Origin and its smaller sibling, uBlock Origin Lite, are experiencing problems thanks to browser vendors that really ought to know better. Developer Raymond Hill, or gorhill on GitHub, is one of the biggest unsung heroes of the modern web. He's the man behind two of the leading browser extensions to block unwanted …
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"people do with their souls, which is their property,"
Probably on theologically shaky ground there.
Besides I cannot quite see how something whose mere existence is widely contested could be property in any commonly accept sense.
I have the title deed to Lucifer's soul which I could offer on EBay if anyone were gullible interested enough to bid for it.*
* might be useful if you had sold yours and now desire to redeem it. :)
Brave has it's own problems: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
I know it's Chromium-based, but I'm currently trying Vivaldi on my personal machine (work won't let us use it work devices - which is a shame as V has excellent multiple profile handling, which is great working for a vendor and needing to have multiple contexts at the same time)
I have been using Vivaldi for a couple years, as I got pushed away from other browsers. I used Firefox since it was Phoenix, but Mozilla started making too many choices that were painful for users. I then used Opera for a couple years.
Vivaldi does have some idiosyncrasies (recovering a session from an accidental exit sucks balls, for example), but I'll probably stick with it for the foreseeable future. I have put Vivaldi updates on manual so that hopefully I can catch any Chromium updates that might block uBlock Origin. To be clear, I'd rather run an old version of Vivaldi with uBlock than anything new and shiny without it.
> https://pm.besharp.at/jira/browse/CC-6550
A political donation from years past and a crypto integration in Brave that takes all of a a couple of mouse clicks to completely de-activate?
That's the sum total of criticism against Brave Browser, which is, hands down, best in class when it comes to ad blocking?
> Brave has it's own problems: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/...
Link is to a long blog post which I abandoned after the following sentence:
"It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution ..."
have we really reached a point where the main criterion for using or not using a piece of software is the political habitus of its developer?
Why would you intentionally nerf Firefox by using uBo lite just to have the same blocker as on Chrome?
I think it's more a case of AlphaGoo nerfing Chrome so it's more ad-friendly. Can't think why they'd do that. Currently uBlock Origin works fine for Firefox, but requires people to STOP USING CHROME!
So solution is simple, at least until AlphaGoo leans on Mozilla to nerf Firefox as well. ABP is pretty much useless, especially as it also tries to push users to paying a subscription. I know some folks that swear by Brave broswer instead of swearing at Edge or Chrome, but haven't tried that one.
Yep, they aren't installed on the system, they are installed in the browser's folder. There's absolutely no reason to handicap Firefox by using uBlock Origin Lite on Firefox just because that is (or soon will be) all that you can use on Chrome.
If you had a kid with a birth defect that left him with only a finger and a thumb on his left hand, would you remove three fingers from your other kid's left hand so they're even?
"If you had a kid with a birth defect that left him with only a finger and a thumb on his left hand, would you remove three fingers from your other kid's left hand so they're even?"
Oh, Damn! I wish I knew that a few years ago.
One reason why Chrome must be taken out of the hands of Google, #1 browser and the #1 ad slinger working side by side and not for the benefit off the consumer but to monetize them. Chrome should be handed over to Apache Software Foundation on a 100% open source, no profit licence. Will it happen, I doubt it as Google has paid off too many politicians to ever get broken up, but you never know maybe the EU will have a set and force the issue.!
It would be tricky but possible to do.
Correction : "Chrome should be handed over to Apache Software Foundation on a 100% open source, no profit licence"
Yes. Imagine that. We could all work to make it better confident that it isn't going to be sold off in the foreseeable future.
> Chrome must be taken out of the hands of Google
It is private property. Taking it of means theft.
What we need is a plethora of different competing browsers,
Unfirtunately today’s UI developers who prefer to sold out to Chrome and are unwilling to support multiple browser. Just like 20 years ago when we had “this site is better viewed in IE” we have “this site is better viewed in Chrome”.
Nobody should be allowed to make a profit. Then we'll shut down the internet, and the hospitals and the supermarkets and all the cellular providers. Oh and the electricity will have to go to. No more running water. No more oil companies. Yay! Also no more planes. Do you need a ride to the supermarket thats 10 miles away? Oops sorry no more cars cause well no incentive to make money so all the mechanics quit. Can't drive a hunk of metal that nobody knows how to repair.
I can't wait for your no profit utopia! It will be amazing when all we're doing is wiping our ass with leaves and eating dirt cause all the farms said fuck it, if we can't make profit, then nobody eats.
This is the reality you want, so its the reality you get.
All this would matter less if it weren't for the fact that web developers - ore, more likely, the developers of the frameworks they use have forgotten the KISS principle. In search of bells and whistles the idea of a universal platform and applications has been lost. Many sites (and it bugs me no end that my own NextCloud server is one of them) will only work with a limited number of browsers.
Mozilla still found the time to remove the "excessive complexity" of allowing the user to turn off auto-select-all when you click in the URL & search boxes. Lots of people have complained and some git at Mozilla keeps on defending the removal of user choice on the basis of "consistent UI across all platforms" which is a rather odd way of looking at it. And quite annoying too. Pity they don't spend more of their time fixing bugs instead, especially the seemingly worse-with-every-release memory leaks.
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For your TV, if you can, install smarttube. The ability to log in, use like/dislike/playlists etc. No ads, sponsor block, loads of other stuff, and a developer who listens to, and acts on, feedback.
open source too
Not sure what that comment about "better computers" is about - the Mac Mini I'm using is a 2012 model if I recall correctly and was just a convenient alternative to a Raspberry Pi since I already had it sitting around unused. If that comment is because you're a Windows user and I mentioned Debian Linux, then my wife's Windows 11 laptop is set to use the Pi Hole as its DNS and also gets the benefit.
As for smart TVs, I don't own one but wouldn't be surprised if their apps bypass the kind of DNS blocking a Pi Hole does. Finally, I haven't seen a pre-roll ad or an ad break in a YouTube video ever on either my laptop or Android phone. That may be the Pi Hole or Ublock Origin (I use Firefox on both laptop and phone, with the YouTube and Chrome apps on the latter disabled).
The other day, I installed pi-hole specifically for my Toshiba television. Telling the TV to use the pi for DHCP and DNS definitely does cause the pi to remove all the snooping connections it's trying to do.
I've just tried the Youtube app on the TV and, yes, there were ads before my selected video. I'll examine the pi-hole log and see if there's anything I can do about that.
The Vivaldi browser has "cast" functionality that allows me (with Ublock Origin) to send ad-free Youtube to the television though.
I love Pi Hole, been running it for years. Does an awesome job blocking trackers and other garbage. Don't forget to turn of DoH in your browser though - they have been trying to sneak around DNS network level filtering.
Unfortunately it is only a DNS blocker. It does not block active code running within the web page on my browser. That is where UBlock Origin comes in.
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Honestly, and I know this could be misconstrued as me saying nice things about ad-slingers… given that a major problem people had with adverts was that they were served from possibly-sketchy 3rd party domains, this does seem like progress of a sort.
Heads up - I found that Chromium (not Chrome, which I don't use) was bypassing the DoH "off" setting in order to allow them to sling ads. I had to use the PiHole block list to block the google DoH address. However, if enough users start blocking the DoH, I predict they will find another way such as performing DNS on the server side so that the browser will send raw IP addresses out for ads.
It sucks. Big time. Just wasted an hour trying to get it to work. After 30 minutes on their forums, I found that "debug 1/log" don't work when you scroll thru reams of commented text in the config file.
The logging is not enabled by default it seems so I don't know what the hell it is blocking or even what it is doing.
It does block on the host machine, but no chance of blocking other machines on the network using the server as a proxy. It is worse than configuring Win95 for dial-up. same with Pi-Hole really. Way way too technical and fantastically boring. Soz, but it 's a black hole of time wasting.
Im not spending my afternoon on this that is for sure. It got to the stage where root was no longer the owner of the config file and it was impossible to change the user so now changes cant be saved to the config file. I'm sure I can find the answer to fix that, but I know if I even look it will be a rabbit hole of a thousand other naffing high-level crap that spawns forth from the never-ending stream of errors, faults and general pain-in-the-arse.
If it gets to that level, forget it and walk away. Life is too short for that level of arcane punchcard-level computing. It is 2024 FFS not 1982. Can not somebody make a piece of software to do this without having to spend days setting it up and being dragged down to near assembly level.
Eh, those objections seem to boil down to “Brandon Eich has political opinions we don’t like” and “Brave once floated the idea of rewriting web-pages to remove publishers’ adverts and insert its own standard-sized static ads, but backed down when it was explained to them what a stupid idea that was”.
I can’t get particularly worked up about either of those.
Won’t switch from Firefox, though.
> It's a snag, though, if like The Reg FOSS desk you habitually run both Firefox and Chrome and wanted to keep both on the same ad blocker.
Why would you want to downgrade your Firefox browser security so it matches the PoS that is Chrome? Your problem is not that uBlock Origin Lite doesn't work on Firefox, it's that Chrome won't let the original uBlock Origin run because it hurts Google's business model. Oh poor Google how will their billions cope.
"Chrome won't let the original uBlock Origin run because it hurts Google's business model"
Indeed. I guess the Reg have to use Chrome on occasion. Sometimes, rarely I have to use Edge and OMG what a horror show that is.
Firefox seemed to had a flaky period a few years back and their browser was much slower than Chrome. Now, I don't see any difference and Firefox is often faster as it is blocking all the crud.
Also, they seem to have stopped trying to jump on whatever bandwagon is rolling into town: not continuously flooding the browser with 'features' dreamt up by some Muppet in marketing to try and justify their wage.
Pocket was the last one that I can remember in that vein. And I like that they have avoided shoehorning AI into it. Keep AI in the search engines, thank you very much as it is useful there in its summary answers at the top of the page.
Using a Chrome-based browser feels like confessing all your sins in a police interview without your solicitor present.
I multi-browser regularly. I was a FireFox only user for years, before switching to Brave as my primary a few years ago. Kept FF as a static browser with a fixed set of home pages so I readily have certain pages available.
Unfortunately, FF is still experiencing the same flaky problem it had years ago. Every few days I will notice the CPU fan cranking, and sure enough, FF is chewing up the CPU. No new pages, nothing extra browsed, just sitting on the same home pages it loaded with. Kill the browser, and re-launch to the same home pages, and the CPU quiets down. I have to do this about every three days.
On certain systems I have noticed advertisements escaping detection on Brave. FireFox is slowly creeping back in to my usage as the primary browser on those systems.
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Or not customers. I live in a small country adjacent to the treasonous colonies. So Radio4 podcasts get inserted ads aimed at our larger neighbors.
You listen to some quiet reasoned debate and then get 3minutes of medical symptoms screamed at you, followed by 3minutes of side-effects warnings, for drugs you can't ask your doctor about -and wouldn't if you could.
Keep AI in the search engines, thank you very much as it is useful there in its summary answers at the top of the page.
I think you might be working with a different definition of "useful" to me. I have to now mentally skip past the AI bollocks at the top of the search results, as it is often not just wrong but contradictory, when I am asking the search engine to find something specific. It turns out that generating an answer based on the average of what the contents of the next sentence might be isn't particularly helpful when you want an exact answer, not a stochastic one.
I'm not entirely convinced firefox was slower. I remember a time when goggle deliberately broke their sites to stop them working within firefox (maybe others). I used to do regular video hangouts with friends and it just stopped working in firefox one day... same went for others. Chrome was fine though... what a surprise.
So Mozilla flagged the crippled for Google version as being too insecure? That... makes sense to me. Just use the full non-crippled version.
Yes I know your premise was 'wanting to run the exact same thing on both browsers', but that's a bad premise that gives Google exactly what it wanted with this particular bit of Be Evil.
> So Mozilla flagged the crippled for Google version as being too insecure?
Well, not exactly, but kinda.
> That... makes sense to me. Just use the full non-crippled version.
Well yes.
> Yes I know your premise was 'wanting to run the exact same thing on both browsers'
It is one more thing for over-hassled users (and sysadmins) to keep track of. I think quite a lot of Chome-engined browser users don't _know_ they are using the Chrome engine.
> but that's a bad premise that gives Google exactly what it wanted with this particular bit of Be Evil.
Well yes.
There are other reasons, though. uBOL does not need an additional browser process; uBO does, which I suppose might be an issue for somebody somewhere. Maybe for super-restrictive permissions? Maybe in headless use? Someone somewhere probably has issues with it.
Perhaps there are innocuous sites that work with uBOL but not with uBO? I don't know of any but there may be.
The wide internet-using world has a remarkable ability to find extraordinarily convoluted ways to break things.
I do get your thoughts on this, Liam, and thank you for taking the time to respond. Of course it would be nice if uBOL were also an option on Firefox and whatever Moz is unhappy about with it can be resolved. Since Moz is still happy to supply the full version (uBO) I don't think they have a fundamental problem with the very fact that it blocks ads very well (including on YouTube) like Google does, so there's nothing conceptually worse about uBOL than uBO. Then it's just down to whether it's worth trying to make Moz's extension checker 'AI' happy.
This.
So Lite doesn't work, but the full version does? I don't see a problem.
And as Doctor Syntax said, none of this would be a problem if weren't for craptastic websites loaded to the gills with useless crud, in the first place
I also use NoScript and the amount of 3rd party servers for a website can run to 20+. This is beyond insanity.
There is no clever icon to express the depth of my utter disgust at the failure of modern website design. --------------------------------->>>>
Firefox, then NoScript, Ublock Origin & Privacy Badger
The very first thing I do with any new windows install.
That's followed by classic shell to restore a usable start menu and OOSU10... this is on W10 as I won't touch 11 until I'm forced to and then have to learn how to block all that shit too
The big issue is 3rd party scripts and iFrames with 3rd party content.
Even the Website operator doesn't know what's being served, because it's often "personalised" by assumed geolocation and tracking. Both are evil.
If websites want adverts they should serve them from their own servers. The 3rd party content can't be trusted.
The privacy concerns for Firefox are easily turned off. Moreover, GorHill also made uMatrix (which is currently abandoned, but does it really need updates?) which is a more secure product and nearly fully configurable. Is it perfect? No. Is it effective? Extremely.
The major downside is that it takes a hearty dedication to configuring it. The learning curve is steep. But I've honed my settings over years, and am quite pleased with the lack of analytics and advertisements that I encounter, as well as the safety it provides.
uMatrix is still available in the Firefox Add-Ons store, and you can fork your own version over at GitHub.
Just view your computer through Vision-Pro glasses and Apple's software will detect and blank out all the ads for only $29.99/month. Also works with off-ine ads.
For an extra fee it will detect and erase android users so you aren't forced to look at peasants while in Starbucks
Mozilla need to get their act together.
Spurious behaviour towards code from a trusted developer gives me a bad feeling. Like someone decided to let a LLM loose on inspecting code. I'm sure it's wonderful analysis will be inaccurate, arbitrary and unreliable. The next line (humans) is probably outsourced to the cheapest provider and is unlikely to even understand what they are supposed to review. "Computer says no."
This isn't the first time that Mozilla is making me uneasy recently after it got its new CEO. I'm prepared to give them a chance on dipping into the ad money trough, but only under two conditions. First, their solution has to provably work and achieve its aims. Secondly, I can still decide if I want to play or not.
That solution is simple... if any site is broken because I refuse to allow it's unnecessary and unneeded scripts and ad flinging software... it's a dead site to me and I leave. The information I was probably looking for will be available in countless other places.
If your solution is to capitulate for 'convenience', then you're part of the problem not the solution.
[Author here]
> There are other browsers out there, of course.
Not really. Realistically, there are currently two.
1. Firefox
2. Chrome
3. That's it.
The end.
Apple users have a third option, Safari, which originated as an offshoot of what became Chrome. But if you run anything else, it's mostly not an option, although Midori gets an honourary mention.
Anything else is basically one of them, possibly with a mask over its head waiting for Fred Jones to rip it off, or it's a really old version of Firefox,... or is hopelessly crippled.
This, in my not remotely humble opinion, is a big problem.
There are possible upcoming alternatives, such as Servo:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/27/servo_returns/
And Ladybird:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/17/serenity_os_turns_five/
There are others which might be contenders one day -- e.g. https://gosub.io/ or https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ -- but not yet.
For something so important, I don't think two is enough.
Per the heading, to quote the old meme (All your base belong to us), the internet thinks it is entitled to the use of your eyeballs at anytime.
To put it succinctly... fuck that shit, they can fuck off. I will never stop blocking ads, the amount of ads I find 'acceptable' is ZERO... I remember when the internet was great, had potential and wasn't entirely enshitified.
I use a VPN, hosts file (for what it's worth) and use my VPN provided DNS. I guess sending all my connections through Albania or Brazil is enough to skew any ad data. I did have pi-hole on a pi at one point and I have used privoxy in the past. But reality is i only use Chromium to access one site, that i don't mind ads on, not that i've ever seen any, but I have noscript set to block all the usual problems like doubleclick, google ads, amazon ads.
I did notice the other day if I set my VPN to Russia, that got rid of all Youtube ads and ads on a bunch of other sites.
But we've been playing this game for a long time, it's kind of like cheaters in Counter Strike back in the day. HLGuard would release an update and a day later a new aimbot would come out that defeated it. I don't think the whole ad blocking saga is any different.
I can quite understand from a browser's point of view that any extension that wants to load into EVERY website, and change content there, is undesirable even if user's installed it.
I totally get that they have advertising revenue to think about too, which is a bit of a conflict.
But I don't get the fuss over this.
If you want to block ads, you need to run a web filter that lives outside of the browser, it's that simple. It's a well-specified, supported configuration in use in millions of businesses around the world, and you can "run it" on your own machine with no dependence on a network or the Internet (literally just run a local proxy that does SSL interception and strips ads, etc. offering a port on localhost, that you put in as a HTTP proxy into your browser). To make it work, you have to authorise the proxy's certificate on your machine to pretend to be ANY site, same as any other SSL interception. And that's still supported by every browser and in use in millions of workplaces and schools every day.
But expecting a simple one-click Chrome extension to have full browsing of everything you do online, and the ability to modify it all silently on the fly... that's not good. And cherrypicking that app X can do that but app Y can't is just problematic for all kinds of reasons (e.g. Kaspersky changing their software underneath users without consent, anti-competition lawsuits from minor players, etc.).
Far better that you just remove the capability entirely and make the user arrange their trusted proxy if that's what they want. It can be as simple as an MSI or app installation on a device and maybe changing one setting.
The browsers are going about things the wrong way here by cherrypicking and blaming other things - they're just blocking known apps that can't prove they're safe, and they should just be blocking the functionality entirely. Even an extension that wants to READ any website (e.g. accessibility) shouldn't be able to modify or block parts of it as easily.
We've reinvented Netscape plugins again, but with only slightly more control, when all ad-blocking can be done as a third-party service running as a trusted web proxy.
@Lee D
If I want to install an addon that can alter all sorts of things then that is done at my risk - the browser is welcome to give me hideously dire warnings about possible security risks, but should not prevent me installing what I want, at my own risk.
If I install backend software to do "blocking" I still have to put some trust in at that stage instead, e.g. if I run Privoxy I could look at all the source code (just like I could for browser addons such as UBO etc) but probably won't, I will just "trust" it (albeit with safety of knowing plenty of technically skilled people will have inspected it, but we all know code inspections do not always spot every issue))
So, risk no matter what stage I have some "adblocking" functionality, and for non technical users I would guess a browser addon is far more likely to be used than e.g. proxying software (& setting it all up), also if we think about "easy" options such as Pi-Hole, for those using ISP low functionality / locked down routers, then adding a basic "1st level" protection such as linking up a Pi-Hole may not be easy for them.
Browser addons are a (IMO) a good way for your non tech savvy relatives to have a safer browsing experience (& I know from bitter experience if you do something more complex for them, if anything ever goes wrong on their system (even though totally unrelated, e.g. a classic "break lots of things" dubious MS update) they always blame you ... so I long since stopped being IT tech support for relatives! ).
Given that websites are flinging all sorts of nastiness at me, then I would sooner use a browser addon I trust (to some degree of trust) rather than just let a website fling all sorts at me & be unable to do nothing about it (we assume I have no backend protection for sake of this argument, i.e. bog standard user).
Disclosure: I use UBO, NoScript & other defensive addons, plus some backend IP/DNS filtering too, but backend stuff not much help when some ads / nasty content served from DNS I may want to allow (tempting as it is (as lots of malware makes use of Cloudflare & similar CDNs to appear innocuous - a Cloudflare URI serving content looks more trustworthy than e.g. evilmalware.com URI) So I cannot ban all Cloudflare IPs as some sites I want to visit use it, hence NoScript is useful for fine grained control as I can see what is served from where and choose to allow (or not) script from a cloudflare URI).
NoScript is, for me, the most important browser addon for security reasons (with heavy use of JS in ad serving it also indirectly blocks a majority of ads)
For me ad blocking via UBO is secondary but mainly for
1. Performance - no / few ads makes a big difference to navigating around the web.
2. Stops pages jiggling around - with async loading, many web pages "move" as yet another bit of ad related content is loaded, this jiggling around increases likelihood of clicking on the wrong content (as page rearranges itself just as you click, so you click on something you did not want to). By having an "immobile" web page without async ad loads, it reduces chance of an accidental nasty click.
3. A long and indefensible history of ads being used to serve malware, so basic sensible browsing to try and protect yourself (if ads had remained, few in number per page & as a small bit of text (or image) with a link then there would be no need for all this, most of us only began to block ads when it became a JS frenzy with large amounts of large space consuming ads per page)
Opera has built in ad blocking for several years. They have just announced Opera One R2. It will continue to support Manifest V2 extensions beyond the expected June 2025 cutoff. UBlock Origin [full fat] is explicitly mentioned.
https://blogs.opera.com/news/2024/10/opera-support-manifest-v2-ad-blocking/
If you run your own home network, maybe look into configuring an old Raspberry Pi with Pi-hole.
Oh. Please don’t do that. The pi is a great little pc but everyone I know whose run pi hole on it has had issues. Remember you’re setting up a 24/7 networking device, not a hobby project. It doesn’t actually have to go wrong that infrequently for it to still be a pain.
Run pi hole on better hardware and it’s bullet proof. I’ve got it in a 1g VM on FreeBSD and it just works.
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