This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
just to be clear, for fear we mentally normalize this
to accept that another person has one sided authority to determine what you can and can't do with a tool, after it is in your possession is weird.
I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome's sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn't make a single dent in Chromium's dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.
Nah it would make a big dent for sure.
Firefox has ~180 million users
Amount of users using adblockers is ~900 million.
It would massively change the market.
Numbers according to mozilla and statista
Im using Firefox because fuck Google's monopoly, but Firefox seems to care little for some stuff I think is critical, namely AV codec support. Lack of out of the box support for HEVC and a few others, which my underlying OS supports perfectly, is a big turn off.
May be time to give Opera a spin
That's true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend's house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend's been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.
What's that? What? What's with the ads? Oh that, that's YT.
I know it is, but what's with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them...
Installed adblocker for him, he's looking at it in shock. I'm looking at him shocked...
People have no idea, what we take for granted. 😅
Yes I agree. If you are using adblocker you are already not an average user. Using A adblocker with custom filters put you on the extreme end and most of those users are either already on FF or have migrated to FF since the MV3 announcement.
And let's not forget adblock made for MV3 will work well enough for those users who aren't using adblocker with custom filters.
Even if Google kill off adblock completely with its browser, chrome will still be dominating the market by a huge margin.
Then why is Google fighting against ad blockers?
Because they want every little dime they can get, no matter what.
Because their an ad company and they don't like any threats to their revenue stream. Same logic as video game companies using DRM. Selling a worse product at a bigger expense to tell shareholders their compelling pirates to pay (even tho most pirates will just not play the game rather than suddenly start purchasing it).
If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree...
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
Opera Browser (before it was sold to a Chinese company) did have its own browser engine before it went Chromium. It was called Presto. source. The team that used to own/run Opera before the sale to China formed again to make the Vivaldi browser.
Vivaldi and Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 addons (like uBlock Origin) until July 2025. The article doesn't say how long Opera will continue, but I'm guessing its the same deadline of July too.
Presto era Opera was fantastic. At the time Firefox was kinda stagnating and Opera was just innovating.
You might like Vivaldi, they're the most innovative chromium derived browser that I've used
I love Vivaldi. Am sad it's Chromium. Wish Firefox would take a page out of Vivaldi's features book and innovation approach.
So... basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?
Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek
So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?
Yes.
Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek
Well, the browser will function just fine with Manifest V2 support removed in July 2025, but lots of addons will no longer work.
without addons to control internet crazy, that word "function" is doing some heavy lifting.
Safari is WebKit, which branched off from Chrome when Google forked WebKit into Blink. So they’re like siblings.
Technically, Chrome branched off from Safari when they forked WebKit into Blink....
Yeah the way I phrased it was super awkward
good. a massive shakeup like that would be great
Opera, being owned by Chinese big tech is probably the only "mainstream" browser I find worse than Chrome and I doubt it will have any measurable effect on Googles market dominance. Don't get me wrong Google would absolutely deserve to trip and fall for the enshittification route they're taking, but I don't see how Opera could do what Firefox can't when Opera is very reliant on Google.
A reminder that Opera is owned by a Chinese public company. I wouldn't trust the browser for privacy reasons.
Not even just that, they also have a history with making loan apps with predatory rates. I wouldnt trust them even if I was a member of CCP.
s/owned by a Chinese public company/proprietary/
Although another problem is that it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Yet another chromium browser with built-in proxies and data collection 🤷
Opera is not a trustworthy browser and there has been no point in it existing since they stopped using presto.
~Why is that? Any extra resources on it not being trustworthy?~
Nevermind, I just read other comments below :)
They explain nothing. They're in the same boat as all others: open source will let them keep MV2 longer than mainstream chrome, but that future is uncertain as the main project codebase starts to evolve around MV3 and backward compatibility to hack MV2 back in gets lost over time. Nobody here can make promises, and sites that make that make those judgments are naive.
Doesn't even matter since it is a Chinese browser. Anyway, the only way to potentially save the www, is to massively take away market share for Chromium based browsers. And unfortunately I doubt this will happen. Since last year, Chrome market share went up, while Firefox market share went down. People are clearly too stupid to make their own fucking decisions.
Just use Firefox and its variants for more privacy. Done. Chromium is a dead road. Even with ungoogled chromium , brave , etc you have to trust the maintainers and their compiled version.
If you're still using Chrome it's a you problem.
Firefox + ublock origin + SponsorBlock for youtube is great. Works on mobile too!
Opera browser? The one that everyone was making a stink about a few years ago? The one owned directly by a Chinese based company, and was supposedly sending telemetry to China?
The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn't mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.
I've been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn't any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.
While the concern remains valid, I'm also asking myself whether it's that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I'm neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.
So in the end it's on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.
I would rather give my data to Firefox than a company who's entire business model is selling user data. That being said, you could use librewolf which removes telemetry. I use both Firefox and librewolf
I stopped using Opera the second it wasn't Norwegian. I use Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile and Vivaldi as the "clean" browser when something k. Waterfox/Librewolf fucks up an important webpage I have to use
A better title: Opera explains shit on how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support. Will talk to developers so see if anyone has a good ideas.
You won't get me off adblock, as of recently i've come to find we get significantly more ads compared to friends and family.
My dad plays wordfeud, so i install and play a set with him...about 5 seconds in i get frustrated at the 4th ad and my dad goes: "which ads".
My friends keep telling me i'm taking the youtube ads far too serious as they are only 10 seconds and show it to me too.
My youtube ads are 1 minute unskippable blocks before and after 1m 51s videos. I'll get a 1min ad block halfway into a 5 minute video even though youtube themselves claim they don't do that.
How the fuck am i so fucked when it comes to ads, my dads phone is almost completely ad free. Heck the google top suggestions that are basically paid for ads don't even show up on his phone.
He can play those free apps (advertisement feeding software) without getting any ads and he's adamant his phone isn't modified.
The other day I got to pondering whether people who work for ad serving companies have ad blockers on their work computers.
I used to work for an ad heavy mobile game and ad serving company couple of years ago, and I had ad blocking at dns level in my house. It blocks not only ads, but also most tracking and telemetry. My bosses wanted to know why my devices were not displaying ads or dialing back to home, they were pretty fucking puzzled. They were terrified others like me were around. Basically their entire business model depends of people not knowing how to block ads and telemetry
I didn't other than for testing, in fact I had to research and figure out ways to bypass ad blockers, to prevent social icons from being blocked etc. I even wrote that company a brand new admin website to replace their old one, they liked it so much that they laid me off a few months later even though they were already underpaying me because they wanted someone cheaper to maintain it, after announcing they had record-breaking year-over-year profits. I found a 30% higher paying job a few months later and been there since. lol
It seems that many people here are not aware of how much Mozilla depends on Google, so switching to them is a small consolation. Maybe it's time to support the development of new engines like Servo and Ladybird more. Servo even recently released an Android version (currently not very usable, but I downloaded it just to show support).
serious question: how does opera (the company) make money?
originally? a paid product. now? crypto!
Partner integrations from what I know - search engines, bookmarks and so on.
Partner integration? You mean a partner of them pays them to be allowed to look at your browsing habits?
Did opera leave Norway? Is this stuff worse after that, if they left? What country did they go to?
Zhou Yahui (Chinese: 周亚辉; born February 1977) is a Chinese billionaire and entrepreneur. In 2008, he founded Kunlun Tech Co Ltd (formerly Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd) one of the largest web game developers in China, where he was the chairman and CEO until 2020. Yahui Zhou currently serves as chairman and co-CEO of Opera. His estimated net worth is US$2.2 billion.
