Why Bother With uBlock Being Blocked In Chrome? Now Is The Best Time To Switch To Firefox::Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs.
I love Firefox. Love it.
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Chrome seems to have such a foothold that it is getting away with embrace/extend/extinguish and I think it’s a very sad thing.
That was Internet Explorer 20 years ago and look where we are now.
I personally can’t remember the last time I had issues with a site on Firefox in the last few years since I switched.
Chrome turning into Internet Explorer was something that I didn’t foresee some years ago.
Heck they have literally done that with Edge lol.
Discord and spotify web versions don’t work on Firefox for me. On discord in can’t connect to a call and Spotify doesn’t play songs or it takes a long time after pressing play for the song to start playing.
Both work flawlessly for me. In fact, discord on Firefox works much better than the standalone app specifically for calls.
Sounds to me like something is broken or misconfigured on your system.
Good to know. I’ll try reinstalling Firefox. Both of these work flawlessly on edge for me.
Interesting. I will have to try discord. I’ve used Spotify with no issues.
This is an especially common problem on Android. I have found many sites whose mobile version simply does not work in Firefox. It’s very frustrating.
Have you got an example I can test? I switched to Firefox mobile over a year ago and I can’t think of any time I’ve come across a site that didn’t work.
The most recent issue I had was Birds and Beans “manage subscription” page so I don’t think you can test that without a coffee subscription. But here is a screenshot:
I’m not sure why it says “nightly” as I’m on the stable version.
This isn’t Firefoxs fault though, is it? Just a bad Website putting arbitrary restrictions in place
Not Firefox’s fault at all. Just a website not following web standards.
I also feel their number grew in the last year. I’ve recently tried using Mull again (mobile firefox privacy-focused fork) after using Bromite for a year, and it was so unbearable I had to switch back. I’d say I had less websites that worked than ones that did not
Unfortunately tracker blocking can lead to even more issues as many sites have started relying on it for basic functionality.
I tried to bring this up as an issue back on Reddit, and I got downvoted into oblivion.
I think sometimes switching your use agent to Chrome can bypass some issues.
So many tech minded people, but at same time, so many of us fail to consider others POV and priorities.
JUST DON’T VISIT THAT WEBSITE! - sure bro, that means i won’t be able to pay the bills this month because the only traditional way of doing this is visiting a physical kiosk at working hour. Did i mention that i gotta work?
Similar with messaging apps.
YOU NEED BETTER FRIENDS LOL - trust me I’ve tried. i also need to send my resume using this app to whoever interviewing me. no, no email. yes, i tried teling that. no, i won’t be that guy preaching about software freedom when all i want is a fucking job.
The first sites I really noticed it on were banking sites. Pretty much essential. Then I noticed more and more sites. Switching to chrome based solved it. But it really, really bothers me that I had to resort to that.
Would love to just ignore such sites, but that becomes a pretty big ask… Sigh
Where do you live where banking sites don’t follow industry standards, even for web development?
I’ve never had a problem with a website outright not working on Firefox, although in some cases features are restricted which usually just require a user agent change (like huddles on slack).
Do you have concrete examples of websites that outright don’t work on Firefox?
There is an addon that does this automatically.
Some pages load weird like a pop-up on mobile that should take over your view window is a side bar instead. Still fully functional but slightly harder to read.
But you know what makes it way harder to read? Ads
Make sure to only do that temporarily and only if it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise just avoid using said website and look for alternatives.
Give me examples. I’ve been using Firefox exclusively for over ten years and I can recall one website I’ve had to use chrome on. That was draw.io to get shared drawing through a Google drive to work.
For me there are certain sites where the site icon doesn’t show up in my bookmarks. While not world shattering, it can be annoying.
That’s such bullshit. People keep saying SO MANY SITES DONT WORK ON FOREFUX
with zero examples.
I see no examples. You’re making a ridiculous claim with no proof and I’m astounded at how many people believe you here.
I think someone needs a hug.
I still see only empty claims lawl
But I keep coming across sites that don’t function properly with it. Is this Firefox’s fault? No - Firefox follows standards nicely. But growing numbers of sites don’t, and this is a big problem at a micro and macro level.
Reminder for others that they can report to Web Compat
This is a good comment! I’ve reported to them in the past. A good reminder.
We should add another E… Embrace, extend, extinguish and enshittify.
on desktop I don’t think I ever notice an issue, but on mobile it’s really noticable
Tbf every time is the best time to switch to Firefox
I would gladly if their Android app wasn’t filled with bugs and performance issues on my phone
It’s bad on Android, but is good on desktop
i’ve been on Firefox in the last 8 years. i don’t even know what’s going on in Chrome and other browsers lol.
Same… I don’t understand the appeal of Chrome. I think they used a new java engine like 10 years ago and beat Firefox in a handful of benchmarks, and then Firefox conclusively and irreconcilably trounced Chrome a few months later, never letting up a bit.
I remember when they released Firefox Quantum. Too many tabs was never a problem again.
I mean I tried to download the official minecraft client for debian and was not able to on Firefox.
Microsoft disabled the site on non Chrome browser
This sounded weird to me, so I just tried it. Running Firefox on Kubuntu, I just downloaded it with one click from here.
Well didn’t work for me on debian
Are you sure? I just tested and after logging in, the option to download the launcher was there (popos/firefox).
Maybe my adblocker is the issue
Just tried it myself and it doesn’t have any issues at all. It seems like it might be an issue with something else on your end.
Though honestly I’d strongly recommend against using the Official launcher as it has been known to introduce bugs and in general has poorer support for mods. I prefer the MultiMC forks like Prism, which don’t have the bugs the official one does.
I wanted sth that is updated by my system and the flatpak I found logged me in as a unsecure user or I had to login at each launch
user agent switching is fortunately not too difficult to do.
Remember when Firefox started dealing damage to IE’s insane monopoly, and then Chrome came along and shanked them both?
I hope Chrome finally eats dirt after basically becoming knockoff IE 2.
Literally every new HTTP standard is coming out of Google’s dev team. That is not a good thing.
As long as Chrome was convenient people preferred it. Now that they are showing their true face and squeezing it in favor of being more ad-friendly I hope people realize there are better choices.
Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?
I’ve never seen any websites use it… btw mozilla kinda abuses widevine by running it in an isolated container (because no one wants proprietary drm software running directly on their machines!)
I wouldn’t really call that an abuse.
is there a word for good kind of abuse (?)
If you are concerned about things like PWAs like I was, try it out anyway. PWAs require a bit more setup, but are a lot more flexible in Firefox. For example, PWAs with http connections have a huge banner in Chrome, and just an icon in Firefox. Everything I’ve noticed is that firefox is just as snappy as Chrome
I thought PWA’s didn’t work on Firefox. That’s good to know, because I’ve been using chromium specifically for PWA’s.
Same here, I tried the PWAsForFirefox extension a few years back and found the setup to be too much of a pain in the ass compared to the Chromium forks. I tried again around 9-12 months ago when Manifest V3 drama was making the rounds and found the extension had been overhauled and that’s no longer a problem. As a bonus each PWA is a self-contained browser instance, so performance is improved when only the PWA is open, and extensions are per-PWA. So I can run only Purple Adblock on my Twitch PWA, or only uBlock for Youtube, etc.
I’m using them heavily as well. Mostly good. Painful though when moving between computers as you have to set them up on each one. If they can get it to sync eventually that’d be handy.
What PWA do you use? I think they’re a neat idea but I haven’t come up with an actual use case yet.
I just use it for any tab which I always have open, so they’re organised on my taskbar. That way I don’t end up with 40 tabs of like 5 different websites that I just pathologically open up a new tab for each time I revisit, having to scan through them all each time I want to switch to find one from before. That’s an ADHD thing though. Effectively for some websites I want the tab to always be pinned and easily accessible with a large icon for a visual cue, and this way that all happens automatically
Why would I use a PWA on the desktop?
Aesthetic and productivity. Which are good reasons.
Let’s say you access your company ERP system through a PWA, or the HR system. You want to alt tab back and forth to it like a regular app. You’re checking supplier data on the web and entering it on the system. It’s a lot easier to do so if your ERP is an app. But if it’s not available as a native app, PWA is a good alternative.
Firefox is my daily driver, but oooh how I miss native tab groups like they have on most chromium browsers right in the tab bar. Extensions like simple tab groups just hit differently and are inferior…
Are there any settings you can tweak in the about:config page? That’s how you have to enable the compact tab size, which is annoying.
I feel you. STG is the best addon I could find, I tried Floorp but it just was not the same thing.
I totally agree. Especially now that you can save the tab groups like bookmarks (experimental flag in chromium)
The people who know what UBO or a firefox even is is the vast minority. Google could single handedly completely fuck over the free internet and a majority still wouldn’t give a fuck as long as they get that sweet sweet one click convinence. The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options. They just want their shit to work, privacy and daddy google violating their basic human rights be damned.
Oh and also some websites make it a huge pain in the ass if you aren’t using chromium. I think its a bit of a conspiracy but could be wrong.
Also stop shilling firefox and start shilling Librewolf
is librewolf on mobile?
Nope only desktop. FF on mobile does have UBO available to install and I hear they are making plans to have all desktop addons be available on mobile at some point. I use kiwi browser for mobile. It is unfortunately chromium based but lets you install all the desktop adds from the chrome store including UBO
Mull is a decent option on Android that’s fairly similar to Librewolf. You have to manually install the apk though.
The average consumer who plays on their phone and tappy taps on their laptop have zero clue how their devices actually work, or that there are more privacy friendly options.
Doesn’t this apply to most things? Phones, laptops, desktops…and cars, refrigerators, garage door openers, light bulbs, etc etc
I switched from Chrome and it was seamless. After a few weeks I didn’t notice any negative difference.
Any numbers from Mozilla about increase in usage or anything?
Or you can DNS level blocking + NewPipe(SponsorBlock)
I mean you can do that and use Firefox, it’s not going to hurt.
Yeah I definitely have to try Firefox at least to know how it run nowdays.
dns level blocking doesn’t work nearly as well as ublock. Not sure what newpipe is (checking it out now), but pihole misses a ton of things that ublock can do. Ublock can also hide elements from things like “disable your ad blocker” messages that always pop up.
I’m definitely wanting to swap back to firefox, but idk who the hell decided to remove PWA support from FF… hopefully they bring that back.
Yeah DNS blocking it’s not perfect but it works almost on all apps WO having to install anything in the OS, I’m using right now NextDNS+NewPipe(SponsorBlock)+ViMusic+Brave and everything it’s going smooth AF. For services like Facebook and YouTube you need forcedly use a free front-end or a modded app.
pi-hole works great for blocking ads on IoT devices. My number one client that gets the most blocks from my pi-hole is my Roku device.
Don’t use Brave, LibreWolf is far better and unlike Brave it doesn’t support the Chromium monopoly
Is there any good alternative for Brave over Android?
Mull is great
I will check it mate thx for the info 👍👍
pihole misses a ton of things that ublock can do
This seems like more of an issue of the adlists you use in pihole. Pihole’s blocking is only as good as the adlists you use on it. I’ve been running a pihole on my home network for years, and I find that as long as I take a few minutes to update the adlists (add new ones, remove dead ones) once or twice a year, it nukes nearly everything. And it’s amazing for blocking things on IoT devices where ublock origin will never be a thing.
Also, they’re not mutually exclusive – one can certainly use both. I use pihole on my home network, and run ffox + UBO on my computers and phone.
There are ads baked in to some websites. Facebook ads make it past pihole.
I personally use both at home I’m just saying pihole doesn’t get everything that unlock does so I always run both
+1 for DNS level ad/tracker blocking. Everyone should check out NextDNS or self host Pi-Hole.
You should still use Firefox or LibreWolf though. Mull is awesome on mobile, it’s the closest thing to LibreWolf.
For YouTube, you can use alternative clients like Piped or Invidious in combination with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links. On mobile, I recommend LibreTube for Android, Yattee with this guide on iOS and SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
👍👍 thx for the info mate…
Without this fiasco, i would’ve still use chrome. Yeah, now i use firefox.
I used to use edge. Switched to Firefox and started using duckduckgo out of protest after my pal got screwed over by Google products
pushed up glasses
It motivated me to finally set up pi hole in my old raspberry pi I wasnt using, so there’s that
doesn’t help with youtube ads unfortunately
A mix of things helps. For most, pi hole/adguard home covers you. For YouTube ads there are a large number of addons and extensions that still cover that. (I actually pay for family premium out of Turkey for various reasons.)
On TV you’ve got iSponsorBlock which can both mute and auto skip (when the skip button becomes available) the ads when they come up, with the added benefit of being able to skip in video sponsoring/ads. And it doesn’t even need to be running on your local network.
There are solutions, just gotta dig around a little bit.
Generally no, but I’ve noticed a couple of times where it said “1 of 2 ads”, 1 ad played, there was a pause, and it went back to the content.
I try to use Libretube on mobile
why the Freenet logo and not I2P? Freenet is not designed with privacy in mind, unlike I2P which literally stands for the Invisible Internet Project.
How Freenet declares itself as a replacement of WWW and Internet, while what is does is delivering WWW sites on the Internet…
Considering, the mobile browser also has addons and will gain hundreds more in a few months. It’s a no-brainer.
This. Youtube is getting progressively more annoying (my train to switch on PC), but what pushed me was Dark Reader on mobile.
