I sometimes have to help my mother out with her chrome and I can't fathom how she can navigate anything
I can see the Lite one available. Which is gimped.
I mean real web extensions
https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/iphone/iphab0432bf6/io...
https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
However, no browser engine has bothered so far because they'd need to upload a separate app to the app store specifically for EU users, and non-EU developers cannot debug the application on a real device so manpower is region-restricted unless you hack around the limitations.
The browser is called Ladybird and it isn’t Apple’s test suite, web-platform-tests is a collective effort all the major players contribute to. Almost two thousand people have contributed to it:
https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/graphs/contributor...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/whats-new-firefox-focus...
I still remember this blog post, which at the the time (late 2021), was 100% accurate: https://web.archive.org/web/20230221123127/https://blog.nori...
Who is voluntarily browsing the internet without adblock?
Granted, it's anecdotal, but if 66% of my upper-division CS students don't even know about Firefox and ad-blocking, than I seriously doubt many non-tech people do.
Similarly, after that lecture, I had a student come to my office hours and ask for more info about ad-blockers. I had them open up msn.com and showed them the large banner ad on the page. It took a few seconds for them to even realize they were being advertised to! I then showed them my browser, nice and ad-free.
I get the impression that people have gotten so used to ads flashing in their face that they gloss over them. But the damage is still done.
In approximately no time at all, I wanted to go full Amish. Maybe Office Space.
Ublock should be protected as a religion. It is divinely inspired and a modern miracle. I know about false idols and the antichrist and all that, but I think even Jesus would approve. Gorhill is a Saint.
Hail Saint gorhill!
I was hoping that the EU directive [1] would give FF a chance of using their own engine, at least in the EU, but no word from that camp, so... I guess not.
1. https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
- Dark Reader (force dark mode on websites that don't have it, like Hacker News)
- Unhook (remove various addictive or annoying elements from YouTube.com)
Bitwarden is free, has clients and browser extensions for every platform, and it's easy to export your passwords and import them. Plus it supports SSH keys.
> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
Chrome has a whole bunch of cool security tricks that definitely outshine many other browsers, but I find it all rather inconsequential when the using Chrome leads to such a terrible, privacy-hostile experience.
I like the browsing experience a lot but there are a few rough edges for sure.
The Graphene team has seemingly partnered with an OEM, who is releasing binary security patches for them already (with source code available after embargo lifts). Hardware does not seem too far away at this point either.
Government agencies have been recommending everyone use an ad blocker for years now.
Edit: It should be mentioned however, that the blocklist for Vanadium is pretty small.
Suffice to say, I do not agree that it's the "best mobile browser" on Android.
I know that kernels are preemptive and have multiple processes running. Feel free to look at my post history if you don't believe me.
Sorry I said the word "closed" when I meant "backgrounded" if that upsets you, but it was pretty obvious what I meant and I am pretty sure you knew that, so I think you're being needlessly pedantic.
[citation needed]
> but it was pretty obvious what I meant
It wasn't. It was possible to work the intended meaning out, but not without initial confusion, which is far from "pretty obvious".
Come on man, do you genuinely think that anyone has ever wanted, on a phone, to have all their tabs running at full power in their pocket? I really don't think this "needs citation".
> It wasn't. It was possible to work the intended meaning out, but not without initial confusion, which is far from "pretty obvious".
It actually was pretty obvious, especially since I said it didn't "properly background tabs", implying that I think things should, you know, be backgrounded, almost as if I know that things run in the background. Saying "closed" was a linguistic shorthand and while I am not going to conduct a broad survey I think most people on this particular forum actually knew what I meant immediately.
> do you genuinely think
Yes, as guided by experiences with fighting various Android mechanisms to respect the will of the user and keep something running in the background, and using an OS that doesn't suspend background applications at all.
Also who says I can’t determine if something is obvious? Hyperbolic example: If I say “my favorite color is green” and you say “well color doesn’t mean anything and is seriously just a spectrum of light and how it reflects off surfaces and really you should learn how light works before making such sweeping statements”, then I think it’s reasonable to say “I obviously meant that I liked how this particular spectrum of light looked on my optic nerve and deciphered by my brain when it reflected on things”, and I could say it’s obvious to everyone, even people who made the comment, because everyone knew what I meant.
I said something about tabs not being “backgrounded”, implying backgrounding, implying things running in the background. Any reasonable person would conclude that I meant about things running in the background.
And if I don’t get to decide if things are “obvious” then you don’t get to decide if you’re being reasonable.
> Yes, as guided by experiences with fighting various Android mechanisms to respect the will of the user and keep something running in the background, and using an OS that doesn't suspend background applications at all.
Even if I believed this, I do not think it should be the default behavior for something that will spend most of its life in someone’s pocket (by design).
> And if I don’t get to decide if things are “obvious” then you don’t get to decide if you’re being reasonable.
Of course. I might be not. But what I'm sure of is that I'm honest and I'm giving you a piece of information that may make you better at communicating in the future, entirely avoiding discussions like this one. Whether you use it to improve yourself or decide that I'm "unreasonable" is up to you and your ego.
> I do not think it should be the default behavior for something that will spend most of its life in someone’s pocket (by design)
If I don't want an app to run, I close it. If I do want it to run in the background, I don't close it but put it in the background instead. If I don't want to use the phone at all, I suspend the whole device. This is the design that has worked perfectly well on my phones for almost two decades now and was always the default there.
I used a word arguably incorrectly ("closed") (though I would like to point out the iOS shortcuts uses that terminology as well), but the surrounding context about being backgrounded makes it very apparent.
Keep in mind, the person who initially responded started giving me a lecture about single-tasking operating systems, as if I don't know that most operating systems are multitasking. Pretty much anyone who frequents this forum will know that operating systems are multitasking, and given that and the fact that I said "backgrounded", it should be immediately obvious what I meant. Neither I nor anyone else here needed to explain to me (or most other people) about multitasking operating systems. This is what I was initially responding to, because the person told me to "Please learn what's what in the system you're using", which is pretty douchey in general, and especially douchey since they're lying about not understanding what I meant.
I'm glad it has improved but I feel like you claiming this is implying dishonesty on my end, and I do not think that's fair.
Again, this isn't weird, this is how everyone acts. If you got food poisoning at a restaurant the first time you went, you might not be inclined to go back to that restaurant even if someone tells you "I swear man, it's gotten better, they wash their hands now!"
This isn't a rag-tag team of people working in their basement for fun. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company and as such it's not wrong to compare them to Google or Apple.
The recent windmill against which I am tilting: Firefox no longer shows you the complete URL. Either in the address bar or long pressing a link. This is incredibly hostile to those of us with technical proficiency which can inspect a URL to see if it is a bad domain or embedding tracking information we would like to strip.
My other long standing annoyance is that on mobile, I can no longer protect cookies. Always keep the cookie to say my HN login, but allow me to bulk delete everything else. Instead, I am forced to manually go through the cookie page (like 10 at a time) and delete everything I do not want.
I lost trust in Firefox after Brendan Eich scandal and the way they treated him.
Nothing beats Safari UX on iOS, nothing.
You can hate the engine and lack of extensions, but Safari is the only thing that I can use with both hands seamlessly without breaking my fingers.
Nothing except for the ads you're forced to see that mobile firefox users don't even know exist, thanks to the full fat uBlock Origin.
That's telling for the state of the web but alas, that's where we are. You give them an inch (-high banner ad) and they'll take a mile (-wide page-covering all-encompassing data-slurping javascript monstrosity).
Does anyone make a Blink-based mobile browser that also blocks ads?
The article says simply "Ublock", but the screens show "uBlock Origin".
"uBlock" and "uBlock Origin" are two different projects.
"uBlock Origin" is the good one.
Yes, Nightly.
But I fear an example of incrementalism here, where it is brightly illustrated how the aperture into which we have the dongle of creeping suckage repeatedly inserted, lubricated by the existence (deterrent) of Chrome, continues to widen.
At the rate which options are disappearing (I think of gnome/gtk), when we excoriate the final and last one, a consummate advertisement platform will have been coded into our DNA, where we not just watch and listen to the perpetual groping of avarice, but feel it existentially.
- the confusing home screen comes up all the time after i leave the browser, while i just want to get back to the last tab
- try closing all private tabs, it then goes on to show the now empty list of private tabs, wtf? The point of closing the tabs was to get back to the regular tabs.
- for all i care a private tab can just be listed next to a normal tab, the grouping in private tabs serves no purpose, except for surfacing implementation details
- filtering bookmarks on tags doesn't work in any version AFAIK
- but it's the only way to listen to youtube, with ublock origin and Youtube audio_only
Also, if I use "Add to home screen" to be able to get to a site quickly, there's no way to open that in a normal tab, making it useless for many things.
26thCreator•7h ago