I’ve gave a new laptop to my mom with firefox and ublock installed. I saw her face in awe as she visited her usual websites without all the cluttler of invasive ads mainstrain web has become
Given the web has become unusable without a fully-functional (!) ad blocker, I am glad I am using Firefox with uBO. Let's hope this leads to an increase in adoption. I see a big risk in Mozilla losing funding by Google in the mid to long term, but on the other hand, what is there to miss in the web as a platform? Even if Firefox was just being lightly maintained by a donation-funded entity, you could keep on using the web normally, I presume.
Even if Firefox was just being lightly maintained by a donation-funded entity, you could keep on using the web normally, I presume.
Given the amount of new JS (and CSS?) features, I'm not so sure if light maintenance is enough to keep up with the feature set required for a functional browser.
Gosh, I absolutely hate the fact we don't have any way to enforce progressive enhancement and have "tiers" of additional browser functionality - it'd be great to see something like
Good old plain html with just formatted text
"core" CSS
Limited JS API with more CSS
Full-blown BS like we've got today
people don't really need bajillion web features, it's mostly artificial demand creation by corporations
and dynamic content loading should be outright banned. (looking at you, Github and Discourse)
I argued something like this with a colleague somewhere around 2010. He looked at me like I’d just sprouted a second head.
It’s not just clueless users and customers, the belief that all these fancy JS features are unambiguously good is widespread among developers too.
I absolutely hate the fact we don't have any way to enforce progressive enhancement
I think that things like NoScript and uMatrix help with progressively enabling just enough for a site to work.
My main browser instance has very little JavaScript enabled by default. I wish that it could be zero, but sadly that’s not realistic. But ‘very little’ is still better than ‘everything’!
GitHub might be the one if the biggest bad examples, and there are definitely to many.
But the web having these functionalities, and getting more, is supposed to be a good thing, an alternative to walled gardens of the app stores. Granted, most of that could still be mostly static, but if I can avoid an app, I will.
What? The web being a moving target full of new shinies is half the point. (The other half is "keeping up with the new shinies is impossible to do without an army of engineers," but that isn't for us)
There are still lots of new features / developer QoL changes in the latest versions of browsers. I wish we could just stop, but people want to rely on them on new websites. It wouldn't happen immediately, but in 2-3 years, you'd start to feel the pain.
For die-hard uBlock Origin fans, Firefox appears to be the only browser left without compromises. With any other browser, you’ll need to settle for uBlock Origin Lite (with fewer features and less ad-blocking success) or whatever built-in ad-blocking feature comes with the browser.
https://arxiv.org/html/2503.01000v2 finds that "Our results reveal no statistically significant reduction in ad-blocking or anti-tracking effectiveness for MV3 ad blockers compared to their MV2 counterparts".
we evaluated uBlock MV3 and MV2 on a main sample of 1,000 websites across five measurement runs beginning July 12, 2025, and obtained consistent results for 824 websites (i.e., websites with valid data across all five runs; others were excluded due to redirects, anti-automation/ad-blocking, or failed instrumentation).
Websites that try to prevent adblocking were excluded. If MV2 uBlock Origin is much better at circumventing anti-adblock measures, this study wouldn't capture it.
As already pointed out, that study looks at a narrow cross section of what is out there. There are also other aspects of uBlock Origin that such a study won't really find.
At least one of those WebExtension API calls on there is Firefox only. It's one of those interesting but also slightly annoying facts about Firefox's switch to WebExtension as a "standard". They took chromes API, proposed to make it into a W3C standard, implemented most of it (not all of it) and also started proposing and introducing new API calls. Some of the latter new API calls seem to have specifically been introduced to allow things that Chrome is not allowing.
Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking.
How This Affected uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025.
If You Use Chrome
uBlock Origin Lite is available for Chrome. This is a separate extension built specifically for Manifest V3, but it has significant limitations:
Cannot use all filter lists simultaneously (rule limits apply)
No cosmetic filtering in the default mode
No scriptlet injection by default
Limited dynamic filtering capabilities
Requires broader host permissions upfront
What I gather from this is that blocking ads is still possible, but with limits. Which likely means to in regular usage for an average user there might not be a perceivable difference if all you care about are visible ads. Just speculation on my part though, I haven't gone through the linked study in detail to see if they accounted for this as well.
My experience of using uBlock Origin Lite vs. full is that Lite is just as good on normal sites, but once you get into a "bad neighborhood" like anything piracy adjacent, it starts showing its limits.
Super interesting study, thank you for sharing. My belief is that paper confirms the Google claim by replicating almost it. Sure, it doesn't matter for the top 1,000 web pages if your adblocker can only block so many URLs, but I think that's exactly the crux. The set of web pages analyzed is rather small and such a shallow view will just disproportionately ignore the long tail of the web?
More to the point, it ignores the bits of the web where strong adblockers are really vital, like pirated sports livestreams, where there is an open antagonism and an arms race between the website and the user's browser.
Every single time someone says he or she can't use Firefox, it's always some lame reason like "I don't like how the tab bar looks." Ok, well enjoy your ads and thanks for strengthening the monoculture.
I assume that most people, even when not lazy, don't believe lil old me over, say, Google or Microsoft, sand they don't see monoculture as a bad thing. Or don't know what the alternative is.
People are so happy to install an app for any little shit site, even knowing what kind of information gathering is going on, what kind of walled garden this is going to, what kind of limitations this brings or will bring.
"So what, I got nothing to hide" (even when they do) it's a great example of that behaviour. Or, "I never use the internet for that anyway" (even when they might, just a different aspect) or "it's good that everything goes through an app store to ban the bad stuff" (even when it doesn't).
I don’t quite agree; sure, that’s its main purpose now. But at the time it was built, google needed the web to be a first class platform, especially on Windows. And there in particular, IE was a problem. They hadn’t yet advanced to the point that tracking information from a desktop browser could be a prime concern.
I guess it makes sense that ungoogled-chromium doesn't count as a major browser. That said, it's probably the best option if you want Chromium and uBlock Origin.
Side note: I find it rather ironic that an article about adblocking is posted on a website that begs you to disable your adblocker and forces you to accept spyware cookies or pay up.
I find it rather ironic that an article about adblocking is posted on a website that begs you to disable your adblocker and forces you to accept spyware cookies or pay up.
Agreed. I guess they still have to pretend they are doing actual reporting and all that.
Neither Safari nor DuckDuckGo—the two other major non-Chromium browsers out there—support uBlock Origin.
I would like to see evidence before considering DuckDuckGo’s to be a major browser. Wouldn’t surprise me if GNOME Web (also not Chromium) and several others were more popular than it.
I read that all the time I have not used another browser than Firefox in more than 10 years. I encounter this less than once a year. Even teams web works in Firefox. What important site doesn't work?
Citi bank broke a few months ago and only resumed working a week ago. Had to use chrome in the meantime. Firefox showed blank page and some console errors.
Or they will be built into non-Google Chromium forks. I use the blocker that is built into Brave Origin (I don't want the Web3 crap) and it has been stellar. Including blocking YouTube ads, etc.
ublock origin is the bane of my normal browser presence, otherwise I wouldn't even use them. The web has turned into never ending stream of ads and trackers. eww, links, offpunk by @ploum are enough for my needs.
Though I miss the ui of umatrix, but Its avident that ublock origin is better in many aspects. Its advanced mode, is really good. The web becomes so much simple, with all the 3rd party, javascript, images, font blocked :D
I never “got” uBlock origin. The model behind uMatrix is so simple I’d almost call it trivial to understand. How can I get a good understanding of exactly what gets blocked when with uBlock origin?
How can I get a good understanding of exactly what gets blocked when with uBlock origin?
So I presume you have enabled advanced mode in ublock setting? If not, you will need to enable it and the best way to discover what gets blocked is using the logger, it is same as umatrix one but with extended functionality, you can also make your own filters which is lacking in umatrix.
It sucks how hostile the web is that it's basically unusable without aggressive resource blocking.
At some point last year, I started to loudly dislike Firefox. A friend suggested Helium, which has uBO preinstalled. I also like it overall; it's nice to have a non-user-hostile Chromium browser (I don't like their new browser comparison on the landing page, though).
No shade on anyone using Firefox (except for the weird tribalism around it). I hope they can both hold out with MV2.
I've been using Firefox since before 1.0. Never switched to anything else (although I use Chrome for VIAL and for testing websites, and I use Safari for a few websites that don't work on Firefox.)
The main issue that i have with Firefox is that some websites don't work on it. It's annoying when your bank web site doesn't support bill pay because you're on Firefox. It's annoying when you get to the end of a 30 minute transaction with an airline to buy tickets only to find out you can't complete it because their crappy code doesn't work with Firefox. (etc. etc. etc.)
Firefox is a fat pig. I admit it. Web browsers in general are fat pigs. But that's why I have lots of RAM, and RAM is cheap, right? (Well, it was when I bought this notebook. 🤣) But other than the aforementioned compatibility issues (probably not Firefox's fault), its RAM usage (only partially Firefox's fault), and occasionally CPU spikes, it really is overall a great browser.
Yes, and that's the reason why I switched back to it after 2-3 years with Arc Browser. Even though I liked a lot of the features Arc released I can't live without an Ad blocker... I'm so happy to leave a chromium-based browser and join an independent web renderer again!
benoliver999 | a day ago
It should also be said that uBlock works on Firefox android too.
jrgtt | a day ago
I’ve gave a new laptop to my mom with firefox and ublock installed. I saw her face in awe as she visited her usual websites without all the cluttler of invasive ads mainstrain web has become
FRIGN | a day ago
Given the web has become unusable without a fully-functional (!) ad blocker, I am glad I am using Firefox with uBO. Let's hope this leads to an increase in adoption. I see a big risk in Mozilla losing funding by Google in the mid to long term, but on the other hand, what is there to miss in the web as a platform? Even if Firefox was just being lightly maintained by a donation-funded entity, you could keep on using the web normally, I presume.
kiyurica | a day ago
Given the amount of new JS (and CSS?) features, I'm not so sure if light maintenance is enough to keep up with the feature set required for a functional browser.
patryk | a day ago
Gosh, I absolutely hate the fact we don't have any way to enforce progressive enhancement and have "tiers" of additional browser functionality - it'd be great to see something like
people don't really need bajillion web features, it's mostly artificial demand creation by corporations
and dynamic content loading should be outright banned. (looking at you, Github and Discourse)
sjamaan | a day ago
I argued something like this with a colleague somewhere around 2010. He looked at me like I’d just sprouted a second head. It’s not just clueless users and customers, the belief that all these fancy JS features are unambiguously good is widespread among developers too.
Garbi | a day ago
It's the internet version of hostile architecture.
rau | a day ago
I think that things like NoScript and uMatrix help with progressively enabling just enough for a site to work.
My main browser instance has very little JavaScript enabled by default. I wish that it could be zero, but sadly that’s not realistic. But ‘very little’ is still better than ‘everything’!
zladuric | 15 hours ago
GitHub might be the one if the biggest bad examples, and there are definitely to many.
But the web having these functionalities, and getting more, is supposed to be a good thing, an alternative to walled gardens of the app stores. Granted, most of that could still be mostly static, but if I can avoid an app, I will.
classichasclass | a day ago
As a former (mostly) one-man-band browser maintainer, it sure isn't.
landon | a day ago
What? The web being a moving target full of new shinies is half the point. (The other half is "keeping up with the new shinies is impossible to do without an army of engineers," but that isn't for us)
viraptor | a day ago
There are still lots of new features / developer QoL changes in the latest versions of browsers. I wish we could just stop, but people want to rely on them on new websites. It wouldn't happen immediately, but in 2-3 years, you'd start to feel the pain.
tuxes | a day ago
https://arxiv.org/html/2503.01000v2 finds that "Our results reveal no statistically significant reduction in ad-blocking or anti-tracking effectiveness for MV3 ad blockers compared to their MV2 counterparts".
Further, Brave's built-in adblocking engine supports uBlock Origin rules, and is being trialled by Firefox too.
lonjil | a day ago
Very important point in that study:
Websites that try to prevent adblocking were excluded. If MV2 uBlock Origin is much better at circumventing anti-adblock measures, this study wouldn't capture it.
tuxes | a day ago
Ah, fair. The uBlock Origin author does suggest that MV2 uBlock Origin will be more effective: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)#if-i-install-ubol-will-i-see-a-difference-with-ubo
creesch | a day ago
As already pointed out, that study looks at a narrow cross section of what is out there. There are also other aspects of uBlock Origin that such a study won't really find.
From a previous comment when this was brought up
gcupc | a day ago
My experience of using uBlock Origin Lite vs. full is that Lite is just as good on normal sites, but once you get into a "bad neighborhood" like anything piracy adjacent, it starts showing its limits.
freddyb | a day ago
Super interesting study, thank you for sharing. My belief is that paper confirms the Google claim by replicating almost it. Sure, it doesn't matter for the top 1,000 web pages if your adblocker can only block so many URLs, but I think that's exactly the crux. The set of web pages analyzed is rather small and such a shallow view will just disproportionately ignore the long tail of the web?
jgb | a day ago
More to the point, it ignores the bits of the web where strong adblockers are really vital, like pirated sports livestreams, where there is an open antagonism and an arms race between the website and the user's browser.
vegai | a day ago
And yet somehow everybody still uses Chrome etc. People are weird.
sjamaan | a day ago
That’s because we keep telling them to (we being developers in general, not literally you and me)
Relax | a day ago
Well why do people keep telling them to?
Every single time someone says he or she can't use Firefox, it's always some lame reason like "I don't like how the tab bar looks." Ok, well enjoy your ads and thanks for strengthening the monoculture.
zladuric | 15 hours ago
I assume that most people, even when not lazy, don't believe lil old me over, say, Google or Microsoft, sand they don't see monoculture as a bad thing. Or don't know what the alternative is.
People are so happy to install an app for any little shit site, even knowing what kind of information gathering is going on, what kind of walled garden this is going to, what kind of limitations this brings or will bring.
"So what, I got nothing to hide" (even when they do) it's a great example of that behaviour. Or, "I never use the internet for that anyway" (even when they might, just a different aspect) or "it's good that everything goes through an app store to ban the bad stuff" (even when it doesn't).
cpurdy | 4 hours ago
Chrome was built for one purpose: To supply Google with better tracking information.
"If the product is free, then you are the product."
hoistbypetard | 4 hours ago
I don’t quite agree; sure, that’s its main purpose now. But at the time it was built, google needed the web to be a first class platform, especially on Windows. And there in particular, IE was a problem. They hadn’t yet advanced to the point that tracking information from a desktop browser could be a prime concern.
vegai | 4 hours ago
Yeah. Although... Firefox is also free.
max-headroom | a day ago
I guess it makes sense that ungoogled-chromium doesn't count as a major browser. That said, it's probably the best option if you want Chromium and uBlock Origin.
Side note: I find it rather ironic that an article about adblocking is posted on a website that begs you to disable your adblocker and forces you to accept spyware cookies or pay up.
zladuric | 15 hours ago
I wouldn't mind the "pay up". I probably wouldn't read it, but I wouldn't mind if the content was paywalled.
I hate the "accept spyware or go".
creesch | a day ago
Agreed. I guess they still have to pretend they are doing actual reporting and all that.
cjr | a day ago
But for how long? I haven't forgotten that Quantum broke all of my extensions and still miss Vimperator.
lonjil | a day ago
There were reasons to get rid of the old system. There are no reasons to get rid of the current system. So presumably for a very long time.
zladuric | 15 hours ago
Isn't it until the end of the year?
chrismorgan | a day ago
I would like to see evidence before considering DuckDuckGo’s to be a major browser. Wouldn’t surprise me if GNOME Web (also not Chromium) and several others were more popular than it.
lonjil | a day ago
DuckDuckGo shows up as an option when you set up an Android phone. Probably has more users from that than anything desktop Linux related.
chrismorgan | a day ago
That’s just about search engines, isn’t it? Not browsers?
dmitrygr | a day ago
The main problem is that fewer and fewer websites support Firefox. I keep running into them. I worry that ad blocking is going to die with Firefox.
KnorrFG | 14 hours ago
I read that all the time I have not used another browser than Firefox in more than 10 years. I encounter this less than once a year. Even teams web works in Firefox. What important site doesn't work?
dmitrygr | 13 hours ago
Citi bank broke a few months ago and only resumed working a week ago. Had to use chrome in the meantime. Firefox showed blank page and some console errors.
nonagoninf | 7 hours ago
Or they will be built into non-Google Chromium forks. I use the blocker that is built into Brave Origin (I don't want the Web3 crap) and it has been stellar. Including blocking YouTube ads, etc.
phaer | a day ago
With a global market share around or below 5% of users, one could argue about whether Firefox even still qualifies as a "major" browser today.
(Writing this from Firefox, which I use on all my devices)
carlomonte | a day ago
isn't privacy badger a superior functional equivalent? maybe coupled with a local resolver and an ads domain blacklist?
untrusem | a day ago
ublock origin is the bane of my normal browser presence, otherwise I wouldn't even use them. The web has turned into never ending stream of ads and trackers. eww, links, offpunk by @ploum are enough for my needs.
Though I miss the ui of umatrix, but Its avident that ublock origin is better in many aspects. Its advanced mode, is really good. The web becomes so much simple, with all the 3rd party, javascript, images, font blocked :D
sjamaan | a day ago
I never “got” uBlock origin. The model behind uMatrix is so simple I’d almost call it trivial to understand. How can I get a good understanding of exactly what gets blocked when with uBlock origin?
untrusem | a day ago
So I presume you have enabled advanced mode in ublock setting? If not, you will need to enable it and the best way to discover what gets blocked is using the logger, it is same as umatrix one but with extended functionality, you can also make your own filters which is lacking in umatrix.
I am thinking of making a blog post about this.
sjamaan | 13 hours ago
That would be really nice!
lake | a day ago
It sucks how hostile the web is that it's basically unusable without aggressive resource blocking.
At some point last year, I started to loudly dislike Firefox. A friend suggested Helium, which has uBO preinstalled. I also like it overall; it's nice to have a non-user-hostile Chromium browser (I don't like their new browser comparison on the landing page, though).
No shade on anyone using Firefox (except for the weird tribalism around it). I hope they can both hold out with MV2.
schell | 22 hours ago
And what is it about Firefox you dislike?
cpurdy | 4 hours ago
I've been using Firefox since before 1.0. Never switched to anything else (although I use Chrome for VIAL and for testing websites, and I use Safari for a few websites that don't work on Firefox.)
The main issue that i have with Firefox is that some websites don't work on it. It's annoying when your bank web site doesn't support bill pay because you're on Firefox. It's annoying when you get to the end of a 30 minute transaction with an airline to buy tickets only to find out you can't complete it because their crappy code doesn't work with Firefox. (etc. etc. etc.)
Firefox is a fat pig. I admit it. Web browsers in general are fat pigs. But that's why I have lots of RAM, and RAM is cheap, right? (Well, it was when I bought this notebook. 🤣) But other than the aforementioned compatibility issues (probably not Firefox's fault), its RAM usage (only partially Firefox's fault), and occasionally CPU spikes, it really is overall a great browser.
kerollmops | 12 hours ago
Yes, and that's the reason why I switched back to it after 2-3 years with Arc Browser. Even though I liked a lot of the features Arc released I can't live without an Ad blocker... I'm so happy to leave a chromium-based browser and join an independent web renderer again!
crodjer | 8 hours ago
Anyone not using Firefox deserves the ads anyway.
radio | 16 hours ago
Install https://helium.computer on your loved ones' computers.