7 ms·
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a sel
by hx8 15d ago
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?
- chr-s 15d agoI'm using Safari w/ AdGuard and it seems to work OK.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- TimTheTinker 15d agouBlock Origin (non-lite) only works on Firefox as far as I know. Brave purportedly has a built-in ad blocker that uses the same lists, but I can't vouch for it personally.
- sumanep 15d agoI use it in Opera without issues
- culi 15d agoBrave maintains its own fork of uBlock Origin for Chromium and hosts it on its own servers but they themselves have admitted they're unsure how long this state of affairs can go on for. Their built-in adblock is quite good but still not nearly as sophisticated as uBO which intelligently intercepts and modifies requests from advertisers to stop tracking. uBO is much more than an adblock tbh
- senfiaj 15d agoYeah, and when you think about the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine, we are very unlikely to see a new browser engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-browser-with-a-completely-new-engine https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if a browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
- happytoexplain 15d ago"even Microsoft" is an oxymoron. Microsoft is exactly the entity I would expect to fail at implementing complex standards.
- sumanep 15d agoYou didn´t understand
- happytoexplain 15d agoWhy the insult with no explanation?
- sumanep 15d agoI did not insult
- happytoexplain 15d agoOh, sorry, in English your wording appears insulting. What don't I understand?
- sumanep 15d agoI think OP didn´t mean the "real" web standars (W3C) but what Google rules that is the actual standars in practice. Edge had to move from his own rendering engine to blink (crhomium) because of that. So "even" Microsoft could not fight that trend. Sorry for my english.
- happytoexplain 15d agoRight, I see what you mean. It's not entirely Microsoft's fault - I'm just taking a shot at them.
- 15d ago
- mhitza 15d agoBrave's adblocker does a good job. As far as I know Firefox started using some of the Rust written components of that engine. Interestingly on fingerprinting test websites, Brave also did significantly better than Firefox + PrivacyBadger + ublock Origin + one or two more which I forgot. When I ran some tests a couple months back.
- andai 15d agoFirefox was slow on my computer (old Thinkpad). I tried using Degoogled Chromium but it kept crashing. So the closest thing for me (Chrome minus Google) was Brave. Vivaldi is cool (I loved Opera 20 years ago) but very laggy on my machine. (They did the UI in JavaScript or something.) I use both now (Brave and Firefox), when I want to use a second account. And Firefox scrolls PDFs more smoothly. (But Chrome-based browsers have sharper text rendering in PDFs! Can't win 'em all!) I like that they both have vertical tabs now.
- kiney 14d agofirefox container tabs are great for multiple accounts with the same webpage
- cute_boi 15d agoTo me helium the best browser right now.
- dartharva 15d agoBrave is nowhere near as snappy as Chrome and Firefox with all its bloat.
- cromka 15d agoBrave is even better since the ad engine is actually built in (lower level) and written in Rust if memory serves me well. And before anyone says anything about crypto: pay a small fee for Brave Origin or use it for free on Linux.
- bigyabai 15d ago> pay a small fee for Brave Origin "Hey, we recognize that normal Brave is exploitative and user-hostile by default. We'll fix it if you pay us $59.99 in mutual acknowledgement that you're a chump who can't install UBO." I'm glad (and unsurprised) that Brave's vision for the web never hit the big leagues.
- bethekidyouwant 15d agoHow is it hostile? Serving you an ad when you don’t have a tab open? Literally open a tab my guy it’s free
- _--__--__ 15d agoMany opponents of Brave online are thoroughly convinced that Brave Rewards (which gives you their Ethereum coin in exchange for showing ads as OS notification) is on by default, when it isn't. They also claim that this replaces blocked ads on webpages (this may have been true very early, I didn't use Brave back then).
- PKop 15d agoIt's not their "vision for the web" it's just an attempt at funding development of the browser given they aren't an ad-network behemoth like Google. Like Kagi charging for their search engine, a company charging money directly for the product is a good idea all things considered. How do you expect them to pay their developers?
- bigyabai 15d ago> How do you expect them to pay their developers? Ethically, for one. I'll be fucked if you expect me to "donate" to a browser that thinks my friends and family deserve a lower-quality browser experience.
- Mashimo 15d agouBlock lite is enough for me. I switched from normal to lite and did not notice a difference.
- bluebarbet 15d agoWith this attitude you can expect uBlock Ultra-Lite and then uBlock Nothing in future. Mozilla is the only remaining obstacle to stop big tech from deciding everything about how the web is rendered. If we don't support Firefox we will get what we deserve.
- Mashimo 15d agoMight be, but I can't take on every battle. I switched from chrome to vivaldi in the hopes of they would keep the v2 api alive. They could not. Currently I can't be asked to switch browser again. Maybe at some point. But OP asked if "is this not enough of a selling point" and I wanted to answer that honestly.
- cube00 15d agoJust wait until Manifest V4 then Manifest V5.
- nickthegreek 15d agothe difference is you are being tracked but not seeing the ads. that’s what you lost when they sunset mv2 for mv3.
- khriss 15d agoIf that's enough for you, then by all means use Chrome.
- Mashimo 15d agoYeah, it's what I do. I use Vivaldi.
- tim333 14d agoI was going to say the same - I haven't noticed any deterioration switching to lite. The user interface is a bit different which took getting used to but I think I now prefer the one in lite.
- curt15 15d agoThis remains true: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
- cm2187 15d agoAgree, and not just that, it allows to escape the hijack of your right click (something google does not tolerate), but they also degraded a lot the experience the last year or two. Number of modal dialog boxes every time it updates (and of course repeat for how many machines you use), also every time there is a pending update, the performance seems to degrade until you close and update, and those updates are very frequent. I don't know if it is my machine but it seems to be struggling when there is more than 2 or 3 video streams on different tabs (increasingly common now that every news websites seems compelled to live stream video on their front page whether you want it or not).
- notafox 15d agoYou may restrict updates in policies.json[1][2]: { "policies": { "AppUpdateURL": "http://127.0.0.1/", "DisableAppUpdate": true, "DisableFirefoxStudies": true, "DisableSystemAddonUpdate": true, "DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true, "ExtensionUpdate": false, } } Syntax should be slightly different for Windows. File should be located in $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR/distribution/ $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR is the installation directory for firefox, which (for default setup) probably will be printed by this: sed -nE 's/^\s*exec (.*\/)firefox .*/\1/p' $(which firefox) # and it's probably /usr/lib/firefox When you decide to update you may temporarily replace policy for permissive one, or you may just install new version in a separate $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR. [1] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/guides/policies-configuration/ https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/guides/policies-confi... [2] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/ https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/
- gblargg 15d agoEven better, I switched to the esr release. It gets updates every week or two, but only for security issues. Otherwise the browser has a stable feature set and no new features.
- fleebee 15d agoI got very annoyed by the pending update pop-ups and the "Restart to keep using Firefox" messages when I opened new tabs, so I switched over to Librewolf and now I get no distracting modals at all and can update it precisely when I feel like it.
- cube00 15d agoSome people seem to enjoy ads, maybe they feel like they'll be first to know about the next hot thing. Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real. Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
- andrew_lettuce 15d agoOccasionally see someone go to yt without ad blocking and I'm blown away, feels like I'm from the 1800's sitting with someone in rush hour traffic - what is going on?
- broken-kebab 15d agoFew month after I started using bare Chromium instead of Brave, and consequently started to see ads, they often felt like a cool joke. I even had an occasional urge to share it with colleagues, like "Look, what they are showing me, haha" But novelty faded, and they became nuisance again.
- kevinmgranger 15d agoI've heard good things about Orion (WebKit)
- MrDrMcCoy 15d agoIt's still unusable on Linux, but I like where it's going.
- krnrrr 11d agoi try to use it as my second browser (just to see whether it could be the first one). and the only thing that keeps me off - not all extensions are supported _at full fledge_. e.g. surfingkeys (for vim-mode) which i've been using pre-dominantly for many-many years in FF. apart from that i love the experience. it's a great browser and i'm looking forward for it to keep up with the counterparts.
- happytoexplain 15d agoOnly? No. Best? Yes, it's not even close. I got the Chrome extension that adds the "Open in Firefox" option to the hyperlink right-click menu. That's how I view all YouTube videos. I'd switch completely to Firefox except for all my data being on Google. It's clear that eventually I will switch to Firefox completely. Google is pure evil.
- culi 15d agoWhen you first install Firefox, there's an option to import all your data from Chrome.
- MrDrMcCoy 15d agoWhy not migrate your data off? As far as browser stuff goes, it's not that hard of a switch.
- happytoexplain 15d agoLaziness. Also I swear YouTube runs much worse on FF. But that's secondary.
- folkrav 15d agoThat second part was indeed pretty self evident years ago, but I regularly watch 4k content on YouTube on low powered machine these days and can't say I see the difference anymore.
- flir 15d agoYou might still in a power usage graph.
- folkrav 15d agoEh, maybe, maybe not. I watch YouTube content, not power usage graphs, perceived performance is good enough for what I do with it. If I'm on battery I'm probably not watching in 4k anyway, at which point the difference in power use should be pretty negligible.
- grebc 15d agoNoScript works well enough just wholesale blocking js.
- MrDrMcCoy 15d agoBrave's adblocker is pretty good, but their means of syncing browsers has kept me away.
- bikelang 15d agoI’ve never been enough of a uBO power user to say conclusively - but I am extremely satisfied with Brave - in particular its ad blocking on YouTube. I also think Brave is by far the best ad block available on iOS.
- Cider9986 15d agoBrave has a quality ad blocker without mv2 but they also support uBlock origin
- MBCook 15d agoSafari and 1Blocker works fine for me.
- pynappo 15d agoFrom my POV, an adblocker's perceived quality is primarily weighted on whether it can block visible ads without impacting performance. While uBO on firefox is a more capable blocker, I honestly don't browse enough sites to know one where uBOL provides a worse experience in this metric than uBO. I prefer vivaldi's UX to firefox enough that i am willing to settle for technically-worse adblocking. If I notice this becoming practically-worse, I will consider switching.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- christophilus 15d agoI’m happy with Brave’s ad blocker. That said, I use Firefox on my desktop machines. It’s a great browser.
- zamadatix 15d agoFirefox probably has the best support of the best ad blocker (uBO), which is really nice in a lot of ways, but whether or not that means it can be the only "quality" one is completely subjective. Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker, let alone debate the differences between the top implementations.
- emacdona 15d ago> Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker I hate that you are right about this :-) It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not. She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker. I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
- unloader6118 15d ago> I hate that you are right about this :-) I love this. Many ADs are blockable because they don't care adblocker. If everybody use an Adblocker, they will come up with something even harder to block. This is engineering time arm race.
- nosioptar 15d agoQutebrowser's ad blocking got much better than it used to be. It's not as good as ubo though.
- fizwidget 15d agoPeople say this, but seeing ads is very rare for me with AdGuard on Safari. I’ve no doubt that it’s technically less comprehensive than the best Firefox ad blockers, but in practice it feels more than “good enough” for me. I imagine others feel the same?
- faizmokh 15d agoFor me I just enabled the built-in privacy feature and uBlock Origin. Haven't see any ads so far. Only downside is I keep getting Google Recaptcha so I have to switch to DDG.
- Genwald 15d agoI wonder how true this is now. I believe the functionality in MV3 has increased since it was released. There's still filters that can't be supported, but it seems like most are. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)#filtering-capabilities-which-cant-be-ported-to-mv3 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/blob/main/chromium/log.txt https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/blob/main/chromium... From "ublock-filters" only 1 filter was unsupported and 90 had unsupported domains dropped out of 10436. From "easylist" 18 out of 56109 filters are unsupported, no unsupported domains. I'm sticking with uBlock-Origin, but not sure how much of a difference it makes these days.
- eviks 15d agoYes, you're incorrect. The mentioned Vivaldi has one (and ublock still works). Brave has one. And even with ublock light you get high enough quality that other bad design decisions of Firefox kill the selling point of a better ad blocker