this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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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.
At absolute most, they risk losing the portion of users who use ad blockers because of this decision. They'll certainly lose less, but are practically guaranteed to not lose more.
They probably determined that the additional ad revenue from those who used to use ad blockers was more than the revenue they'd lose from people leaving.
I don't agree with it, but I bet that's happening here. Personally, I'd be surprised if 20% or more of Chrome users have an ad blockers installed. Even fewer would use Revanced or the like.
It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.
If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?
I just did research on this. Up to 33% (according to some sources) of Americans use an adblocker. That feels like a dent to me...
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
I wish Firefox would build a tablet/scalable interface. It's horrible on a tablet and breaks on DeX.
If you're gonna use Opera anyway, why not just use Brave and disable the crypto stuff? The native adblocker on Brave is on par with uBlock Origin and performs even better. Opera is probably the worst direction you can go from where you are right now...
There are at least 3.45 billion Chrome users (not chromium, chrome).
Out of those ~900 million adblocker users, how many are using those adblockers that let paid advertiser's to get on a whitelist? How many are willing to make an effort to change browsers? Firefox's 180 million users is the indicative of this, and not all of them user adblockers, so the numbers keep getting thinner.
It wouldn't make a single dent in Chrome's dominance.
This is the hypothetical we are talking about. This is obviously not realistic so i dont know what your point is.
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. 😅
It would actually.
Google makes money on ads. They think they can force more money to make. People switching to Firefox makes that a wasted effort for Google as you descibed.
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.
Over half of all Americans use an ad blocker. It's time to recognize that average users do block ads.
According to both websites, the research was conducted on just 2000 USA citizens. In my opinion, that's a lot of weight being pulled by claiming they represent the entire country. I am unable to download the research papers here, but what does it say about the sample? If they are researching solely on more tech savvy people, then I think the results are very likely to be skewed to one side
Frankly, I'm not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.
Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in "48 markets") use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.
My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they're not just niche tools anymore.
I'm not really trying to disprove or disagree with anything, I just think that knowing the sample is important. For instance, earlier in Hungary, we've had a lot of billboards and other media claiming that 99% of Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine and gender affirming politics. In a purely statistical sense, this was correct and could dissuade the common folk into thinking that's representative of the country. However when you investigate further, their research was done on just a couple thousand citizens that were all either affiliated someway to Fidesz (the rulling party) or historically voted for them, which overwhelmingly skews the results towards one end.
Hey, I think you're totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn't release the full data publicly, and the survey was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there's reason to suspect that the data is biased.
I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don't subscribe to their data service, I don't have details of the methodology here, either.
What is there to recognize? This is a survey conducted on 2,000 Americans. 2,000 is just 0.00057% of the whole US population which is estimated at 345,426,571.
The average user absolutely do not use block ads unless it is enabled by default in the browser. Chrome with the largest market share does not block ads by default and if you are going out of your way to block ads or use a browser like brave that do that by default you my friend are already not an average user.
You...don't understand how surveys work, I see.
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).
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.
I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera's move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote 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...
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
Yes.
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.
Yes. Which was not the topic being discussed.
The idea was that Google Chrome would lose a significant market share because of this. And, on the off chance that somehow happens, that is basically a death sentence for all the browsers dependent on Chromium.
Hmm, okay if thats the only thing you're willing to discuss, I'll respond directly to that then.
The idea that Google is going to have significant market share loss from removing V2 manifest support is laughable. This is especially true if you're saying the market share for Chromium will decline specifically for uBlock Origin no longer working. As of right now there are:
So if 100% of uBlock Origin users stopped using Chromium browsers because of lack of uBlock Origin that would only represent a loss of .769%. Not even 1%.
Further, I'm betting Google would continue to keep development on Chromium going even with significant market share loss to some other browser. Google was around for the late 1990s and early 2000s when Microsoft absolutely dominated the web browser market and had the ability to literally change the specifications of the web on a whim and locking out non-Microsoft systems from the full web experience. A company Google's size (and business model) cannot be safe if a competitor can change the web standards for the web client (browser) that Google products run in.
I say all of this as a loving user of Firefox with uBlock Origin, that I'm posting this comment with right now. However, I'm realistic about the situation as it exists today.
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
I know I’m a drop in the bucket but I have always been a diehard Google fanboy and, in the recent years, have switched to iOS, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. No regrets.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens! (Switched to Apple after 12 years of being an Android enthusiast.)
Unfortunately, I doubt it. Chrome made it as big as it did because it had one of the biggest tech and advertising companies in the world behind it. Other than Microsoft with building in Internet Explorer into Windows, thereor Apple doing that with Safari, isn't anything else that could compete as easily, and we all how that went for Microsoft.
And it would only be harder today, since they'd not only have go contend with Chrome, but also that a lot of websites are being built around Chrome/browsers using the Chromium engine. People would go to a website that either refuses to work, or doesn't work properly for their browser and hop over to Chrome instead.
Netflix requires specific DRM addons that are really only available for the major browser engines, as an example. If someone is rolling their own, like KDE does, then that's going to refuse to work outright.
i don’t think it’s working