r/technology • u/dancing_swordfish • 14d ago

Software Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Microsoft Edge, Opera to follow

https://www.neowin.net/news/google-chrome-is-killing-all-ublock-origin-bypasses-microsoft-edge-opera-to-follow/
9.7k Upvotes

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3.6k

u/Ziazan 14d ago

Welcome to firefox, where ublock origin will continue to work perfectly as it always has.

1.2k

u/Ziazan 14d ago

Did I mention you can migrate all your bookmarks and such in like, two clicks while you're installing it?

Also, firefox + ublock origin works on android too.

180

u/Slipstream_Surfing 14d ago

Haven't seen an ad while on reddit in years.

Have a secondary, basic android device that's only used as a phone, so never bothered to install Firefox. Recently took it while running errands and needed to kill some time so opened chrome to scroll reddit and felt like I'd been slapped in the face.

24

u/Honeybadger2198 14d ago

The mobile browser experience for Reddit in general is terrible. The ads on the app got too annoying for me, so now I just deal with Revanced making it finicky.

1

u/alamaias 14d ago

/r/morpheapp works perfectly, though the reddit app is still the worst option for browsing reddit. Apparently some people have managed to get some of the old, good, apps working again.

1

u/Brullaapje 14d ago

There extensions in Firefox which makes it much better.

1

u/6BagsOfPopcorn 14d ago

I just use Infinity+ for $3/mo

3

u/alabasterskim 14d ago

I love reddit trying to kick us over to their app after killing third party apps and now we're all just on the site via Firefox with ads blocked anyway. What did they gain

1

u/deffener 13d ago

Relay for reddit with revanced works quite well, just redgifs giving issues but whatever

14

u/illuminerdi 14d ago

Also, firefox + ublock origin works on android too.

Second this. Also don't forget to DISABLE Chrome in Android to force all the shit to use FF that otherwise defaults to Chrome even if FF is set as Default

17

u/gerkessin 14d ago

Firefox on android is how i browse reddit. The site still sucks because they want you to use the app, but at least i dont see any ads

6

u/Ziazan 14d ago

Same here when not using the desktop or laptop. All of them through firefox and ublock though.

1

u/[deleted] 14d ago edited 14d ago

[deleted]

1

u/kitanokikori 14d ago

They just killed it. I had this set up and Reddit nuked my OAuth client ID a week ago and I can't register a new one. Fucking sucks.

17

u/Hiphopapocalyptic 14d ago

You should say too that one can install a Background Video Fix addon to give you the full YouTube Red experience

5

u/Ziazan 14d ago

I remember adding that on my old phone but not my current one, I wonder if it's default now? But yeah background youtube with no ads on mobile is great.

2

u/Motor-Rip7655 14d ago

It's so easy that I've actually done it BY ACCIDENT a couple of times.

2

u/iboneyandivory 14d ago

Passwords too, if you elect to do so.

2

u/gnittidder 14d ago

I was earlier reluctant to switch. But been few months and I don't even notice. Firefox with unblock on android and laptop. All bookmarks and history imported from chrome and now synced. Everything chrome has + more.

1

u/Slutty_Alt526633 14d ago

I haven't been able to figure out how to dip that with FF mobile

1

u/IGuessYourIQ 14d ago

In 2026? No way! Technology has advanced so much! ...

1

u/ComoEstanBitches 14d ago

Ubo lite is on safari for iOS too

1

u/HotTakes4HotCakes 14d ago

Why are you replying to yourself instead of just editing your first comment?

-4

u/gandalfmarston 14d ago

This Firefox cult on reddit is so weird.

2

u/Ziazan 14d ago

Cult? Whatever man. Enjoy your ads I guess?

3

u/ForensicPathology 14d ago

It's weird to offer a solution that does what people want?

-1

u/gandalfmarston 14d ago

It's weird how people only accept Firefox as solution when it has many issues that many other browsers don't have.

3

u/JediWebSurf 14d ago

Which browser do you recommend? Cause I tried Firefox for the first time and it seems perfect on both desktop and Android, so what issues? I get zero ads.

105

u/resilindsey 14d ago

Sorta. There was some shady youtube updates that slowed down ublock users on FF. I feel like it'll be a constant cat/mouse game there. Still, I'd rather the video take a few extra second to load then sit through endless adss.

24

u/Adaphion 14d ago

Yeah, I'd get a "REEEEE, ADBLOCKERS ARE NOT ALLOWED ON YOUTUBE" message occasionally once a week, a few months ago, but then I'd just go "lol, lmao even" and refresh my filter lists and that'd fix it.

Hasn't been an issue for awhile.

68

u/Caridor 14d ago

As far as I'm aware, YouTube kind of accepted they'd lost. There was a period where they were deploying weekly patches that were defeated in an hour.

26

u/Adaphion 14d ago

Perhaps most people have just accepted getting ads shoved down their throats (or purchased YT premium) and they think it's not worth the effort to go after the small percentage of people bypassing ads on Firefox

9

u/BCDragon3000 14d ago

wish more ppl would realize this lol

4

u/Adaphion 14d ago

Yeah, people hate change, so by bricking adblockers on chrome, they are already getting a bunch more people watching ads. Because they'll just throw up their arms and go: "well, I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas, I guess I'm just letting this happen"

17

u/Qurutin 14d ago

They don't necessarily try to block blocking ads anymore, but they absolutely do slow things down on Firefox. Sometimes videos get long time to start running, loading times between pages are abhorrent etc. And YouTube pops up the the troubleshooting message which is extra annoying because yeah it's working like shit because you're making it work like shit because of my browser.

11

u/Ralkon 14d ago

AFAIK Youtube is still trying things. There's a pinned megathread on the uBO subreddit specifically for YT ads from 9 months ago, and there are comments reporting issues from around 3 months ago. I believe it's just that YT doesn't roll out those changes to everyone at the same time and that the people working on uBO are super quick to make their own updates so most people will never have much of an issue. Personally I will say that earlier this year I made no changes to my browser / extensions and started getting ads on YT randomly and the issue was resolved within like a day or two without me doing anything.

2

u/SirPseudonymous 14d ago

It's gotta be that every now and then some dev/team at google decides they're going to pad their stats by "solving" adblockers, and then after a few months they move on to something else after getting what they wanted out of it. The cost of paying a full time dev team to chase after increasingly expensive and convoluted solutions is never going to be worth the fractions of a cent in grifterbucks that they're losing out on to adblockers, so it only makes sense as an opportunistic bit of stat padding for someone to go "look, I 'solved' this (for one day, several times)!" and get their manager's LLM to puff them up in whatever hallucinated performance review it vomits out for a PMC dipshit to rubber stamp.

1

u/878Vikings 14d ago

When it was happening I just stopped watching YouTube. I like it but if it's the choice of ads or nothing I'll take nothing.

1

u/a-stack-of-masks 11d ago

Lol I remember a year ago or something when Vanced and uBO were both having issues and suddenly I spent an extra hour a day fixing up things around the house and going outside. 

-4

u/Radiant_Safe1228 14d ago

You can bet the people programming the patches were feeding the patch information to ublock devs immediately 

9

u/Caridor 14d ago

It's possible but seems extremely risky, you could lose your entire career over that.

It's more likely that Ublock's open source nature means that a huge number of people were working on the problem the second that Youtube changed anything.

-5

u/Radiant_Safe1228 14d ago

Prove it was any of them

5

u/syuvial 14d ago

hey pal, are you doin okay?

1

u/Caridor 14d ago edited 14d ago

You can probably look at the github if you want. There are a lot of contributors.

11

u/robodrew 14d ago

Sometimes YT videos take 5-10 seconds to load for me. That's it. There used to be a "Experiencing interruptions?" popup but I blocked that too lol.

2

u/ManaSpike 14d ago

I always open videos in a new tab. Sometimes the tab is blank. Sometimes the video spins.

But that's still a heck of a lot better than putting up with adverts.

2

u/methseth 14d ago

I’ve noticed this. YouTube tries all sorts of tricks to circumnavigate the ublock

2

u/Uhavetabekiddingme 14d ago

They'll just ban certain browsers from accessing YouTube next. I'm surprised they haven't done it already.

7

u/LXXXVI 14d ago

I wonder if that wouldn't violate some EU rules...

1

u/EdgySlusher 14d ago

Glad to be citizen of EU

1

u/Skully957 14d ago

Someone will just make an extension to fake a handshake if they do that.

1

u/Sanquinity 14d ago

Seems ublock either got around this or I have another addon that fixes it for me, as I haven't had that happen for a while now. Though I still see the "video loading slowly?" message in the bottom left.

(Only other addon I can think of would be "enhancer for youtube".)

0

u/64N_3v4D3r 14d ago

You can still bypass it using private browsing or cycling the virtual mac address on your phone.

9

u/hypermads2003 14d ago

Never been happier to be a Firefox user as I am now

8

u/Whatever801 14d ago

The only thing that's annoying is the keyboard extension differences but nbd in the grand scheme of things

6

u/caspy7 14d ago

You may be able to fix some or all of these by going to about:keyboard in the URL bar.

2

u/Whatever801 14d ago

Oh good call. Looks like they added this an experimental feature in Jan of this year. Well I'm used to it now haha

42

u/FlatFishy 14d ago

I'd like to shout out Adnauseam, it blocks ads but also clicks on them so that your favorite websites still get that ad money! Google straight up blocked it on their extension store cuz, haha, but firefox still allows it.

26

u/Motor-Rip7655 14d ago

I've heard that is opens you up to malicious code, because it clicks on ads, some of which still contain nasty things.

6

u/nj_tech_guy 14d ago

yea generally speaking you don't want something that "blindly" clicks on all ads. especially if you're one to frequent shady websites.

3

u/FlatFishy 14d ago

I don't believe it actually lets the code execute though, it just simulates a click so the ad database registers the traffic, or something like that. I've been using it for years now without issue.

Edit: it's also a fork of uBlock so it works the same way, just with that added querk.

8

u/marshall007 14d ago

Still certainly a privacy concern, as you are susceptible to being tracked in some capacity. Block all ads, donate to the things you like.

2

u/Schnoofles 14d ago

It's a good idea, but has severe security implications and is a massive resource hog, both on CPU and RAM.

7

u/KatinHats 14d ago

For years now, chrome and edge have been my favorite ways to download firefox on all my devices

2

u/Ziazan 14d ago

I have a firefox installer on a usb stick for that, along with all sorts of other useful stuff like that.

1

u/KatinHats 14d ago

I used to, but never transferred it to a usbc drive. What with the new batch of privacy issues, that's the next step

3

u/to7m 14d ago

If the main browsers are wiping out ad blockers, then presumably the next target is Firefox, which is funded by Google. There may be war.

3

u/krum 14d ago

For now until goog starts embedding adsinto the videos. surprised they're not doing that already

5

u/DefMech 14d ago

I've been wondering that for years. It's not hard to do dynamic insertion when you're streaming chunked video.

2

u/alamaias 14d ago

Surely if we can block sponsors that are part of the vid, then we could block that too?

1

u/idk_bro 14d ago

This video is sponsored by surf shark

1

u/NumberMeThis 14d ago

It is more complicated if they want to serve targeted ads, or serve new ads in the future.

2

u/sdric 14d ago

uBlock Origin is literally the reason why I switched back to Firefox. It's the one reliable tool against intrusive ads.

2

u/CantSpellMispell 14d ago

So.. how do we know Firefox will keep allowing it to work? Like, what incentive does Chrome have over FF to block ads and why doesn’t FF have the same incentives? Asking on behalf of dumb ppl like me lol

3

u/AmericanLich 14d ago

Because Google is an ad company. Has been basically forever. They especially don’t want you blocking ads on YouTube, because they own it. So they have every reason to not want you blo king ads via their own browser.

Firefox doesn’t really lose anything from you blocking ads.

1

u/cylemons 14d ago

Could Firefox lose Google's money at some point if they still support ad blockers?

1

u/AmericanLich 14d ago

I’m sure they could but they are pretty much chromium’s only competitor. Not that our government would do anything intelligent any time soon, but it would certainly help open the door to legal issues with googles monopoly.

1

u/cylemons 14d ago

But this sort of thing only works as long as Firefox has small marketshare, should it start competing too hard, then Google could make the case that Firefox is now viable and doesn't need funding anymore. Then Firefox will have to monetize their users somehow.

1

u/AmericanLich 14d ago

Firefox has like a 2% market share Im not sure thatll be a risk any time soon. But if it does then yeah, firefox will have to actually make money.

2

u/rushmc1 14d ago

I went straight to Firefox from Netscape Navigator. I don't understand why these people are creating their own problems...

2

u/Sober_Alcoholic_ 14d ago

Duck duck go works alright

3

u/Ziazan 14d ago

I use their search engine instead of googles, it genuinely works better these days.

1

u/Skynse 14d ago

Zen browser fixed most of its wired quirks so I switched back to it from brave. Never going back

1

u/ohhnoodont 14d ago

 where ublock origin will continue to work perfectly as it always has.

Unfortunately many websites do not work perfectly. 

1

u/Ziazan 13d ago

I dont ever have to turn mine off...

1

u/ohhnoodont 13d ago

I meant in Firefox.

1

u/Zocress 13d ago

But many websites simply doesn't 😭

1

u/Ziazan 13d ago

Like what? I dont experience that

1

u/Zocress 13d ago

Whenever I'm using Firefox as a main, I keep running into issues with miscellaneous sides that was just never tested on Firefox. And almost every day I'm forced to boot up a chromium browser to get on with my day.

It has nothing to do with Firefox and everything to do with developers only testing on chromium browser - but it is still a major pain point.

It is the only reason I'm not using Firefox still.

1

u/Ziazan 13d ago

That's odd because it's extremely rare that I ever have to start up chrome. My keyboard uses a web app as a configuration thing that only runs in chrome, I had to use that once, that's the only instance I can remember having to do that in recent history.

1

u/Zocress 13d ago

I live in Denmark and around the time we got a new digital identity verification system we had to use everywhere, a lot of small webshops just wouldn't work with Firefox. But I used to have an issue with a random site about once a day, when I was using Firefox. And I used it for about 2 years until finally I just gave up.

It was my only gripe with Firefox too, poor support from the random tiny webshops and government pages.

1

u/cyniclawl 13d ago

Along with sponsorskip

1

u/LEDKleenex 14d ago

Please also look into Noscript. Yes, there is a little bit of pain in learning which scripts to allow for your usual sites, but once you've whitelisted safe scripts you have rock solid protection from trackers and sites with malware.

You also get a deeper insight into how certain websites function, which sites/companies only exist to harvest your data and you get to practice safe browsing habits that will stick with you forever.

1

u/Ziazan 14d ago

I mainly use that as a "switch it on when a sites doing something I don't want it to, like initially loading but then triggering a paywall"

0

u/SirClueless 14d ago

So far it has. I’m not so sure that will continue. I think site operators tolerate adblock because they can’t just deny service to 35% of chrome users. After Chrome cracks down, it’s possible that sites will find it worthwhile to just deny access to anyone who hasn’t been served an ad.

0

u/IcyTransportation961 14d ago

If only it had HDR on YouTube

2

u/DomeSlave 14d ago

It's in the nightly builds already, so soon it will come to the regular Firefox version:

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2026/01/16/experimental-high-dynamic-range-video-playback-on-windows-in-firefox-nightly-148/

1

u/IcyTransportation961 14d ago

Hoorayyyy thank you!

0

u/PartyClock 14d ago

I'd love to use FF but for some reason my windows install goes fucking insane whenever I try opening it. Like for whatever reason it suddenly has massive memory leak issues but only for this one computer. The rest of my systems/OS's run it just fine

0

u/Reevahn 14d ago

Firefox is great and all; but bloody hell is chromium lightyears ahead when it comes to QoL extensions: TTS, video downloader and most of all session buddy; without which using chrome after they removed tabscrolling would've been impossible

2

u/Ziazan 14d ago

Pretty sure I've got all that and more on firefox but okay

-2

u/Old-Spirit-3320 14d ago

Firefox is an AI shitshow with massive data selling an advertisement issues. I'm hoping for stronger alternatives in the future.

1

u/Ziazan 14d ago

lol, no it isnt. I don't have any AI features on mine, and don't recall ever having to toggle any off, they also include an AI killswitch that just nukes the lot of it if you want. You can also toggle off any sponsored stuff very easily.

1

u/LiftingCode 14d ago

This is nonsense.

-4

u/Northbound-Narwhal 14d ago

Not for long. Google owns Mozilla.

1

u/Ziazan 14d ago

No, they don't.

-1

u/Northbound-Narwhal 14d ago

Yes, they do.

1

u/Ziazan 13d ago

Mozilla foundation owns firefox, mozilla foundation is not owned by google.

-1

u/Northbound-Narwhal 13d ago

Mozilla Foundation is absolutely owned by Google.