Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting in June 2024

ArsTechnica has the report on this. As if I didn’t hate Google and it’s behavior, but this is just gross. Google already started by messing with ad blocker users with YouTube, but to basically emaciate ad blockers in Google Chrome is disgusting behavior, especially as the dominant web browser in the world.

If we had a working government I would say they should do something about this, but they are so bad when it comes to understanding tech at all that they would never do anything in time or correctly.

Google’s Manifest V3 is utter garbage and won’t do any of the things they claim with privacy benefits, it is literally only to help their bottom line by stopping ad blockers.

One can only hope that this will push more people back to the vastly superior Firefox, but since they already switched to Google’s Manifest V2, and are also supposed to support Manifest V3, which means they should never have switched to Web Extensions, but at least they claim they will continue to support webrequests in MV3.

Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest. We will continue to work with content blockers and other key consumers of this API to identify current and future alternatives where appropriate. Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we are committed to ensuring that Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.

Manifest v3 in Firefox: Recap & Next Steps

9to5Mac on Best Extensions for Safari for Mac, iPhone and iPad in 2022

From Arin Waichulis at 9to5 Mac, this is worth a read.

I had never heard of StopTheMadness, which is not cheap (as you have to buy Mac and Mobile versions at $7.99 each) and the Mac version also works on Firefox and Chrome as well. It overrides websites attempts to lock out browser features, which is something I have been thinking about for a long time. It can also remove tracking tags, and URL shorteners.

Groovy Post on 7 Firefox Extensions for Managing Your Bookmarks

Sandy Writtenhouse at Groovy Poste has a great post on 7 great extensions for managing your bookmarks in Firefox.

And yes of course I still use Firefox, and you should do. It is independent of Google and it’s Chrome browser that you know monitors everything you do for Google, and it’s Blink engine is just used everywhere. Their is also Apple’s Safari which uses WebKit and I am forced to use that my iPhone and iPad, but on my desktop I prefer the customization of Firefox and Mozilla’s Gecko engine.

And Mozilla needs the support, it’s market share keeps going down in favor of Chrome, and we need the competition. If there is no competition why would google put the money it does into Chrome, so go check out Mozilla’s Firefox, it is a great browser!

I will sometime do a post about my favorite extensions, like Tree Style Tab which I find so much more convenient than top loading tabs.