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4 browsers that will continue to support uBlock Origin and other ad blockers with Manifest V2
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Basically because in the later year, the development of firefox took very curious directions, from trying to break some decades old, standard feature (only to revert when gmail users, of all things, complained en masse), to integrating many useless extensions (pocket anyone?) that you can't remove and that are more and more difficult to disable. To say nothing of the occasional advertisement for irrelevant products. Basically, even if it's on a smaller scale, using firefox today is starting to look like using windows: you have to fight it on every update to remove something they bork.
And I'm not even talking about the shit that happens at their mother business, Mozilla.
All of this is even more infuriating, because they could very easily not do it and still pursue their venture. Have Firefox, the web browser, be a thing, and have all the shit actually packaged as a separate extension. Heck, even sell or promote it as "Firefox+" or whatever. Just, don't break the core feature to add "smart bookmarks" or whatever VPN ads.
are ads and 24/7 surveillance not worse than this though? and all of googles questionable business practices they do not only on chrome but all of their products? i think the choice is clear here. perfect doesnt have to be the enemy of better.
"worse" is debatable, but they certainly are an issue.
However, that doesn't make it ok in Firefox either. Having a good reputation does not mean you can burn it away by trying your best to look the same as the bad guy you're supposed to fight. Firefox mobile, for a very plain and simple example, have stuff like "future experiment" and telemetry enabled by default. Sure, I can disable them, but they should either be disabled by default, or have a one-time popup that provides the option on the first launch.
My position is that if a piece of software becomes increasingly intrusive and tedious to use with each "update", it's time to look somewhere else. Whether it's Firefox, Chrome, or even OS like Windows. Having to fight back to get to a decent, usable state means that it's no longer the right tool for you.
Fortunately, some people are doing the heavy lifting by providing what would be considered "vanilla" firefox with some good forks, as far as being a browser goes.