I don't "bypass" Chrome when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Firefox. I don't "bypass" Windows when they want to melt my brain with their business model, I use Linux. No idea why so many "hackers" doing "bypasses" can't instead take action that is simpler, long lasting, and easier. Do people need to jerked around 50 times for 20 years before realizing it will keep happening and their "bypasses" are just temporary bandaids?
> No idea why so many "hackers" doing "bypasses" ....
Because that's what it means to be a hacker. Yes, installing Firefox is simpler (and I'm a Firefox user) but I respect the effort to overcome Google's measures in disallowing certain addons.
Sure. But to me "hacking" this cat and mouse game is not very compelling. I feel like I've seen a thousand articles exactly like this over the years. This won't work in 4 months.
>But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions using opt_webViewInstanceId actually had WebView permissions. For the report, I netted a massive reward of $0. They decided it wasn't a security issue, and honestly, I agree, because it didn't give extensions access to data they didn't already have.
The effort to overcome the community's chance at discovering the workaround?
It was never going to last long enough anyways, being sure to get patched as soon as any adblocker uses it.
It's however still interesting in the sense that it might be fairly trivial to change, so chances are the next adblockers are going to ship executable that wrap chrome, modifying something like that at launch, allowing their extension to make use of it.
Obviously Google is going to hate it when random popular extensions start nagging users to download and install "companion" software in order to work, since that will train users to not think twice about these things and bypasses legitimate security efforts.
But Google made their own bed - and that of their users. Now they all get to lie in it together.
Once the legitimate adblock extensions have made the tech news cycle by switching to an executable, all the sketchy adblock extensions will follow, and after them the downright malicious but heavily advertised adblock extensions. Before long Google will have plenty of examples to point to of adblockers shipping malware, allowing them to scare off all the tech-illiterate people (who are the vast majority of users)
except that for a majority of users, windows is where their applications are at - such as gaming, word processing, or some other thing. Sure there are replacements (somewhat) for each of those categories, but they are not direct replacements, and require a cost of some kind (retraining, or a substitute quality). This is esp. true for gaming, and it's only recent that gaming has made some inroads via the steam deck (steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC (only handheld PCs with AMD processors iirc).
People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.
> I mostly game in a Windows 10 VM running on my Linux desktop computer. Single keypress to switch to Linux workspace.
> This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.
> It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.
You would get a fully separate leisure desktop if you were running Linux in that VM so it sounds like you are running Windows in the VM because Linux gaming is not adequate.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I'm in a situation where I want GPU passthrough to Linux guests. The problem is that the Looking Glass guest application for linux is unmaintained. This makes it impossible to have the same setup but with a linux guest instead of Windows.
If you want to have GPU accelerated video output from a guest vm to a linux host, the only way is with a Windows guest (to the best of my knowledge). If you just need compute then that is different.
Of course it depends on what you're playing, but VM gaming is not 100% compatible, lots of anti cheats will ban VM users and it's a cat and mouse game to not get detected.
It is maybe 95% of native performance or in that ballpark, according to benchmarks I've seen.
I have a dedicated M2 disk that I pass thru fully to the Windows VM in order to have snappy disk, and I reserved 64 GB ram to that VM alone using hugepages (because I multibox a old game that requires lots of RAM for my use case).
I also pass thru the bluetooth hardware into the VM as I don't use bluetooth on my host, so that I can use my dualsense controller while gaming in the VM.
Web has become the default platform, where most people run most of their app/spend most of their time. Even Microsoft has had no choice but to embrace it, and Outlook (as in, the one from Microsoft office) is now a web first app (normal outlook is rebranded "classic" and we all know where this is heading, for better or worse). In a way, that makes switching OS much easier.
If you add to that that Windows itself is getting major visual overhauls from version to version (sometimes even within) it's not like sticking with it protects you from having to learn different UX paradigms and habits.
And regarding gaming, well, linux with Proton runs games faster than Windows nowadays, that's how little Microsoft cares about gamers/how good Valve is (depending on how you look at it), but the fact of the matter remains.
I was going to post a rant on drivers in Linux, but on my newest Lenovo laptop Linux Mint/Ubuntu off the shelve driver support is actually complete and Windows 10 (unsupported by Lenovo) extremely lacking (no wifi driver, no lid driver, no proper standby). And there's no way I'm going to start using Windows 11.
So yeah, maybe this is the year of Linux. After decades on this planet :p
> (steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC
Most of its secret sauce is either in Proton or upstreamed into Wine, DXVK, SDL, etc. All available to a general PC.
Unless your focus is competitive online games, which often come with Windows-only anti-cheats, you've got a huge catalogue of great games playable on Linux distros. I did the switch about four months ago and I'm not missing Windows, the only pain point has been Nvidia drivers and I'll be solving that by switching vendors.
Web version sucks compared to desktop version, unless you use the apps minimally. That said, the Winapps repo is a good linux solution, running a windows VM and accessing the office apps via RDP so they feel like a native app. As soon as it gets wayland support, I'm making the full switch. Winapps in Xwayland has some issues.
Fedora Bazzite it's Steam OS. And with Flatpak and Lutris you can have that setup everywhere, but some distros optimize the setings and compilations for the desktop better than Others:
I don’t know. Eventually you read enough of this stuff and you would rather the next breath be, take leadership on a real solution. To me it’s a “sequitur” to say, the biggest fuck you is to convince people to stop using Chrome, not to fix bugs for their extremely highly paid engineers for free.
I switched to Firefox, but I'm unfortunately stuck to Windows for professional work. I need several high profile software to get proper Linux support before I can make that jump.
When I eventually go indie, though: I am 100% making use of a Linux workflow.
>Do people need to jerked around 50 times for 20 years before realizing it will keep happening and their "bypasses" are just temporary bandaids?
Sadly, yes. The networkign effect is extremely strong. Twitter was complained about even before musk, but it still too 3 years before people really started considering the move. emphasis on "consider": because twitter still has a lot of foot traffic for what it is in 2025.
I get what you're saying, but the problem is the software does 90% of what I want really well and I like that they do that 90% super well and I want to keep that.
In your Windows vs. Linux example, Linux just doesn't do a lot of things very well on the UI/UX side of things (e.g., window management, driver support, an out of the box experience). Knock Windows all you want, but it honestly does quite a few pretty important things very well.
So that's why I'll spend some time to resist the negative changes.
>In your Windows vs. Linux example, Linux just doesn't do a lot of things very well on the UI/UX side of things (e.g., window management, driver support, an out of the box experience).
That judgement confuses me a lot. Window management, drivers and out of the box experience has been much better in Linux for the last 10 years in my experience. Sure, there are some companies that don't ship drivers for Linux or the configuration software is not fully fledged.
Window management has almost always been better in Linux, but of course depends on the WM. Windows innovated one nice feature in Vista (aero snap) which most desktop environments has implemented since.
If you install Fedora, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, what are you lacking from that out of the box experience? Generally no driver installation needed, and no cleaning up of bloatware.
Have you ever used Linux with high DPI monitors? Windows handles them OK since Windows Vista, and really well since 8. I've seen the classic Windows XP bug of measurements not being scaled and labels being cut off on modern Linux.
How about mixed DPI multi monitor setups? Great since Windows 10. On Linux, you're screwed. X doesn't support this. Wayland does, but not all apps work well with that, and not all apps and GPUs support Wayland.
This is a bit outdated i run mixed multi monitor setup and for last year or two it has been working no issues. Linux moves slowly but steadily and things eventualy get pretty great (another example sound and pipewire).
I think people make mistake of trying Ubuntu LTS thats super conservative with updates so you are years behind. For desktop you really want Fedora or something even more up to date. I think people sould try Fedora silverblue or its derivatives (bazzite, bluefin) its “atomic” distros that cannot be easily broken (steamos does the same).
I have tried this a year or two ago, with something that was not LTS. I was using KDE though, maybe GNOME is a bit less broken in that regard (but is in others).
I've been using this since at least 2019, it's been fine. The only two issues are the mouse doesn't (always) align when moving across monitors and having a window across the display border has one side stretched, but why would you have windows like that?
With regard to window management, this will certainly depend on the distro. Ubuntu's WM has been quite good I'll admit, but that seems to have occurred in only pretty recent versions in the past 5 years or so. My previous experience with Ubuntu had the window management closer to the experience that MacOS provides (albeit slightly better). Ultimately, this point is subjective, so maybe it wasn't the best example.
Driver support is still a very big problem in my opinion, especially if you're a laptop user. There was a lot of tweaking with power configuration that I needed to do to prevent my laptop running Ubuntu 22.01 from dying in 2 hours. Additionally, trackpad drivers were horrendous, which made two-finger scrolling next to impossible to do with any sort of accuracy. Hardware accessories like printers, keyboards, etc. are still a gamble.
You're right though that it has gotten a lot better, but it's these little things that prevent most users from making the switch.
I get it, and mostly agree, but sometimes consumers don’t have much choice with browsers and OSs; moreover, most consumers are simply technologically ignorant or agnostic of those things. Many users don’t even know exactly what a browser or OS is, and they just want to live their lives scrolling through tiktok or getting work done.
Another advantage of this approach is that collectively it applies pressure against such toxic business models. This pressure can have an outsized impact for the number of people that do it because it skews towards technical people who will naturally influence their area of expertise more than the same number of lay users.
I'm with you with this idea but relying on firefox is not much better. I use PWAs a lot and Firefox decided that PWAs are not worth implementing or maintaining their past implementation.
I still use firefox 70% of the time but this is wrong and go against what the users want.
Yep. That and stuff like the filesystem API. That thing is so useful for apps like excalidraw, photopea, etc,. They really need to implement it.
They should at least implement it behind a feature flag, if they feel like virtue signalling how they're oh-so-concerned for the privacy implications. (while simultaneously launching an ads business in the backdrop)
Is this on Linux? Do you have an example of a website where Yubikey does not work? I'm curious, because I use Firefox on Linux for years, also for work, and never hit a site where my Yubikeys would not work. (I'm also using Google Meet regularly for work from Firefox without problems)
Well, mine doesn't work, so I'm still using Chrome. When they make it work, I'll switch to Firefox. There should really be a big fat "report bug" button on all these apps that captures logs and sends it with 1-click permission and a voice recording to explain what's wrong, like Tesla FSD's bug reporting system. I don't have bandwidth to deal with their community forums and all the crap it takes to register for them.
The article is clearly not intended as an ad-blocking tutorial, it is an article about security research and API weirdness.
Sure, it inspires ad blocking meta-discussion, but if you're complaining that the author has a strategically suboptimal approach to blocking ads then you have missed the point.
It supports keeping long term history so you can find a page you visited years ago from the history search in the address bar. Chrome/Google likes when you have to search for it and Brave has inherited that.
The "crypto bullshit" which is a notice on the start page with an option to permanently remove and turn it off.
I swear people slating Brave here haven't actually even installed it.
Oh and its opensource, not like theres anything hiding in the shadows here, you can go and look at the code behind how its all working for yourself if you're that paranoid.
Bro it’s for the fun and interest of figuring it out. That’s what hackers do. The writer obviously knew it’s a “temporary bandaid” — they notified Google about it themself.
Firefox is the option that doesn't intentionally leave users vulnerable to hostile adtech. Firefox is the option with containers. Past that it is performant and reliable under a wide variety of user loads and platforms.
or Pretty bad as in Firefox+forks are better than the alternatives?
It is true that some unfortunate default options were recently added to Firefox configs.
Those options are unfortunate because they are variants of anti-user options baked into Chromium - options created to keep Chromium users susceptible to big-tech's worst intentions.
Those "default options" are precisely "intentionally leav[ing] users vulnerable to hostile ad tech" (e.g. PPA). It's built into the browser and on by default. Mozilla have very explicitly stated they believe ads are critical for the web. It is still better the chrome though (and a patch set like librewolf is better still).
Mozilla can have this position (and probably have it due to most of their funding coming from an ad company), but can still hold the position that the user must remain in control and be able to remove ads if they wish, even if it goes against the beliefs of Mozilla. Meanwhile, Google is actively working to make it harder to block ads in Chrome and in general work on technology which take away users freedom to control how their own computers should behave.
> Those "default options" are precisely "intentionally leav[ing] users vulnerable to hostile ad tech" (e.g. PPA).
The difference between Firefox's 1x and Chromium's 100x + 100x is in the degree of harm visited upon the user.
Finding harsh fault with former while giving the much more egregious example a pass -- this makes sense if one feels Firefox isn't abusive enough towards it's users.
> I keep seeing this argument against using Firefox, but as a long time user I fail to see any glaring issues with it.
No glaring or usability issues.
What happened is that Firefox added some defaults that mimic a tiny bit of Chromium browser behavior.
Recommend extensions as you browse
Recommend features as you browse
Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
There's that and the long-time sponsored crap on the new tab page. It takes a moment to toggle it all off.
I browse the web daily, and the number of website that ever gave me trouble on Firefox can be counted on a single hand. The website compatibility issue is vastly overblown.
> trouble on Firefox can be counted on a single hand
*over the course of a few years, seriously.
In particular, it's sad to encounter such a rare issue only to then discover its true origin - Firefox implemented a necessary functionality according to spec, whereas Chrome decided to do its own thing. Case in point video streaming with Motion JPEG, Firefox dispatches events on every frame and uses a lot of resources, but Chrome decided not to do that, against the spec.
I set my default choice to pro-privacy (Firefox) and occasionally give it up to some Chromium variant if I depend on a functionality and a website justifiable needs it. The disruption to my workflow here is such a minor thing compared to what I gain usability wise, especially in the long run. I would never treat a software program like some religion, and it saddens me that even computer-savvy people do just that.
I've switched to Firefox 3 years ago now after using Chrome for a decade. The list of things I missed from chrome:
- Tab grouping, now added in Firefox as of a few months ago
- built-in translation services. Firefox is slowly introducing this, but its missing many languages. In the meantime, a translation extension works fine.
- Google products operating better... but the issue here is obvious and outside of Firefox's control.
- various micro quirks from random sites I might find during research. Nothing functionality breaking, just clear examples where there was likely hard coded chrome user agent business.
- the occasional extension on Chrome that didn't have a Firefox port. This happened maybe 4 times total.
so, 2 things that are fixed (or close to), one anti-competitive measure, and the 2 smallest nitpicks I could imagine. I don't know what the fuss is that justifies Firefox being considered vastly inferior to Chrome these days. Even thsoe small issues are far offset by the ability to have proper adblock. Using Adblock on Chrome for my work computer is miserable.
Firefox has been my main browser for almost 10 years and I haven't encountered any challenges other than availability of plugins, but even that has been a very rare issue.
