this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024

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338

Opera explains how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support as Google Chrome disables it (www.neowin.net)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 48 minutes ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 44 minutes ago

If you use android, just use adguard private dns. It will get rid of third party apps ads. For youtube you need revanced or newpipe

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

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?

Why the hell would anyone still be using Opera???

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

People are still using it thanks to them forcing (ig sponsors from yt videos) and appealing to young generations with the opera gx browser and Twitter account mostly.
With the regular browser I assume they got it by accident while downloading adware(this might have happened to gx).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I'm using Fennec which also removes telemetry, but many standard users are not comfortable installing apps that aren't on Google play.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

The amount of people who only feel comfortable downloading on Google Play and also care about privacy I feel like is very small but I don't know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Some people would rather give their data to opera then firefox 🤦‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

Mozilla seems to be transitioning to becoming an advertising company so I wouldn't want them to have my data either.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there's that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they'd have to maintain independently.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

This is supposition but...

I imagine that disabling V2 is as simple as setting a flag during compile, at present. Obviously as the rest of the code base progresses it will become less simple to enable V2 support.

From a marketing perspective, the smart play is to say that you'll continue supporting uBlock Origin and keep saying that for at least the next month or so, in order to gather up some refugees from chrome. Thereafter tell every one that your built in blocker is better than uBlock Origin anyway, and then drop support for V2.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

serious question: how does opera (the company) make money?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 15 hours ago

originally? a paid product. now? crypto!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Partner integrations from what I know - search engines, bookmarks and so on.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 22 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 104 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Opera is not a trustworthy browser and there has been no point in it existing since they stopped using presto.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 16 hours ago

Impostors, in other words.

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[–] [email protected] 137 points 1 day ago (2 children)

A reminder that Opera is owned by a Chinese public company. I wouldn't trust the browser for privacy reasons.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 🤷

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

What do you mean substitute Proprietary?

Is it not true?

I seam to remember they got bought, and then their Norwegian presence suddenly got much smaller

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

No, they've definitely been Chinese last time I've checked. It's just that it seems a bit weird to me to distrust software just because it's Chinese, since foss stuff from china can be trusted as it's possible to audit it (say, shadowsocks or xray), and proprietary software from outside of china can send your data wherever it's programmed to (e.g. windows or chrome). Besides, while it's alleged China could influence Chinese developers to either hand over userdata or backdoor the software, it's not like other governments can't, and for an average Joe the consequences are, I suspect, more or less the same

[–] [email protected] 156 points 1 day ago (23 children)

I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome's sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 day ago (17 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

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...

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago

I wish Firefox would build a tablet/scalable interface. It's horrible on a tablet and breaks on DeX.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago

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. 😅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago

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.

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