I absolutely agree with that from a technical perspective, but in typical usage, the users won't notice any difference.
To be honest, I think uBo almost become a cult (which is nothing wrong, to be clear). It has lots of very opinionated development progress happened/happening to it, and most of them are irrelevant for majority of users (even the "power" users). And if I dare to say, it's at the cost of its UX.
For example, a few years ago, uBo disabled the ability to "greenlight" a domain (i.e. adding a whitelist dynamic rule) by simply clicking in the (advanced) popup. The official reason is that it's the most misused features, which is true, but it makes legitimate use of it (to whitelist a 3rd-party domain for a specific site because otherwise the site is broken) very inconvenient.
And if you ask about it, they (people in related forums like reddit) tell you "well you should never use it. NOOP should be sufficient. If not, the rules are wrong and you should report to the rule author(s)." This is cool but it didn't solve my immediate problem that a site I want to visit is broken by uBo.
I learned later, again from uBo subreddit, that you can double press ctrl to temporarily enable this feature back -- which is more than enough for me -- but how the hell do you even discover this?
And I never remembered what the two columns for adding dynamic rules are supposed to be -- since there is no headers.
The problem is that as much as I want Firefox to be a better browser than chrome - Blink is still a far better rendering engine than anything else. Every other browser either has inferior performance (including Firefox) or is just a fork of chrome.
I spent a year trying to use Firefox after being a chrome user for well over a decade - I eventually switched back when Mozilla started adding the same tracking features that chrome started out with years ago. Mozilla seems to be going down the same path, albeit several years behind and slowly. After that I just didn’t see a reason to not just use chrome if I’m going to have to neuter tracking bullshit anyway since it’s still much more performant than Firefox.
V3 complaint UB exists (UBo Lite) and works plenty fine save for what even I (as a power user) would call power user features. It’s very annoying that Google is going down this route, and I really want Firefox to be the better browser, but I just don’t think it is yet. During my year of usage you definitely can notice the performance difference and the inconsistency in certain webpages.
Firefox has a vested interest (money) now for people to watch (their network) ads. Expect to move Firefox to drop uBlock too (written in Firefox with uBlock)
You say that like web rendering engines grow on trees...
At this point your (multi-platform) options are:
- Chrome + its kin
- Firefox + its kin
There is one/two new "third" browsers/engines in the works that will be ready "who knows when".
The shift you'd make is from Firefox to something based on Firefox / Chrome... then you wait and hope that Ladybird actually gets somewhere or that the Servo engine doesn't take another forever to mature... and someone builds a browser around it. I'd call that mighty slim pickings. Especially considering how beholden the downstream browsers are to the upstream ones, particularly for smaller projects.
I have ADHD and I cannot use a product if there is ads. In any form they exist in, they take up time, energy, and attention, all of which I have precious little of compared to the average person.
Ensuring I still have PiHole or NextDNS to block ads at a DNS level, I'd use Safari with any adblock extension.
Failing that, I'd browse the compatible web with a TUI browse in terminal.
Failing that I'm reading books and taking notes on paper or in Vim. No internet for me.
I'm a screen reader user. It's similar for me, accept if I really wanted to navigate around the ads I suppose i could. However i do have chronic migraines, so that reduces my ability to care about ads. Or X embeds, Or facebook sharing widgets. So no, it isn't just an ad thing, it's a let's not take a whole bunch of energy to navigate a page thing.
I sympathise. It annoys me to no end that accessibility seems to be an afterthought on the modern web.
Another thing for me is that popups annoy me. If I get too many modals pop up on a page, I get emotionally frustrated. This is quite common these days with some websites– all it takes is one GDPR cookies modal and an AI chat popup in the bottom right corner– and that's already way more frustration than my brain can handle.
"For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix"
Why take the word of the developers of a Chromium-based browser, some of whom may not even be part of the project in the long run? Firefox is built on an entirely different engine and doesn't have this problem.
Because eventually there will be enough changes to the upstream Chromium codebase that the only way to keep these extensions working would be to stop following upstream, which would mean massively increased development costs.
People keep saying that and it's true. Also every extension on firefox that I installed said "I need permission to do whatever i want with your browser", which made me really uncomfortable
> "My response was to a comment that it's still available on chrome store. I no longer see that comment.
> Assuming it was deleted, does HN change parent comments if parent was deleted? - that's misleading."
That's not possible as far as i know; What is possible, is that the original commenter EDITED their comment to a different text, soon after they posted it.
To be honest, I think uBo almost become a cult (which is nothing wrong, to be clear). It has lots of very opinionated development progress happened/happening to it, and most of them are irrelevant for majority of users (even the "power" users). And if I dare to say, it's at the cost of its UX.
For example, a few years ago, uBo disabled the ability to "greenlight" a domain (i.e. adding a whitelist dynamic rule) by simply clicking in the (advanced) popup. The official reason is that it's the most misused features, which is true, but it makes legitimate use of it (to whitelist a 3rd-party domain for a specific site because otherwise the site is broken) very inconvenient.
And if you ask about it, they (people in related forums like reddit) tell you "well you should never use it. NOOP should be sufficient. If not, the rules are wrong and you should report to the rule author(s)." This is cool but it didn't solve my immediate problem that a site I want to visit is broken by uBo.
I learned later, again from uBo subreddit, that you can double press ctrl to temporarily enable this feature back -- which is more than enough for me -- but how the hell do you even discover this?
And I never remembered what the two columns for adding dynamic rules are supposed to be -- since there is no headers.