Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update
(0x44.xyz)945 points by deryilz a day ago
945 points by deryilz a day ago
A monopoly achieved thanks to everyone that forgot about IE lesson, and instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application.
> instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application
I am confused.
- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.
- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.
- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
Devs, particularly those with pressure to ship or who don't know better, unfortunately see 'it works in Chrome' as 'it works', even if it is a quirk of Chrome that causes it to work, or if they use Chrome related hacks that break compatibility with other browsers to get it to work in Chrome.
- Sometimes the standards don't define some exact behavior and it is left for the browser implementer to come up with. Chrome implements it one way and other browsers implement it the other way. Both are compatible with the standards.
- Sometimes the app contains errors, but certain permissive behaviors of Chrome mean it works ok and the app is shipped. The developers work around the guesses that Chrome makes and cobble the app together. (there may be a load of warnings in the console). Other browsers don't make the same guesses so the app is shipped in a state that it will only work on Chrome.
- Sometimes Chrome (or mobile Safari) specific APIs or functions are used as people don't know any better.
- Some security / WAF / anti-bot software relies on Chrome specific JavaScript quirks (that there may be no standards for) and thinks that the user using Firefox or another browser that isn't Chrome or iOS safari is a bot and blocks them.
In many ways, Chrome is the new IE, through no fault of Google or the authors of other browsers.
> how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
They have so much market share that they control the standards bodies. The tail wags the dog.
Web features being pushed by Google via Chrome, aren't standards, unless everyone actually agrees they are worthy of becoming one.
Shipping Electron junk, strengthens Google and Chrome market presence, and the reference to Web standards, why bother when it is whatever Chrome is capable of.
Web devs with worthy skills of forgotten times, would rather use regular processes alongside the default system browser.
> how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
Easy when they make Chrome do whatever they want and call it a living standard (whatever that is). There is no such thing as web standards now.
Consumers never really pick products for ideological reasons, no matter how galling that is to ideologues
You should block adds for practical reasons too though, not just for moral reasons.
I can't fathom how there are so many devs that don't use adblockers. It is so strange and when I look over their shoulders I get a shocking reminder how the web looks for them.
I think ads go well past "ideaology". very few like ads, and they have only gotten more persistent over recent years.
KDE invented Electron, when they built KHTML as independently embeddable HTML + CSS + JS engine.
Mozilla did it with Gecko even earlier, really — but they gave up on it to focus on browser itself. (There were a number of Gecko-based browsers like GNOME default browser Epiphany using it)
Apple built WebKit on top of KHTML just as Gecko stopped being updated: I guess they invented it too.
Tools like Windmill (web rendering automation for testing) took programmable concept further.
And Sun did very similar things with Java applets and Java applet runtime for desktop.
Only because Microsoft got slapped on the wrist way back when.
Google should get slapped too, and they might be headed that way...
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/20/nx-s1-5367750/google-breakup-...
Safari is also pretty user-hostile, which is why Apple is getting sued by the DOJ for purposely hobbling Safari while forbidding any other browser engine on IOS. They did this so that developers are forced to write native apps, which allows Apple to skim 30% off any purchase made through an app.
> IE was far less user-hostile than Chrome.
What exactly do you mean by this?
IE was horrible to use which is why so many people switched to Firefox. It wasn't because of web standards.
IE didn't have tabs when every other browser moved to that.
IE didn't block pop ups when every other browser would do that.
Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up! Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)
The issue is completely different if the users of an app or a website are customers. Then you have to make it work for them or you'll lose sales. If it's non-commercial project then it doesn't matter if it works with all browsers or not.
Not everyone. Some of us used Firefox all along and didn't just go with the "default" invasive thing.
That's fundamentally a mischaracterization.
Everyone focused on short term gains. Optimizing for browser with 30% market share, backed by Google makes more sense than a browser with 20%. Repeat with 40% and 20% respectively. And so on, and so on.
There isn't a lesson to learn. It's just short term thinking.
Now Google has enough power and lacks scruples that would prevent it from exploiting.
The answer is antitrust.
The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
Yes to everything except the first statement:
> The answer is antitrust.
Anti-trust is crucial to make the capitalist economy work prperly, I agree
But another answer is "Firefox"
> If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers).
I disagree, on two fronts.
First, I think that the underlying root cause is a level lower - it's the fact that so much content on the web is funded via privacy-invasive and malware-laden advertisements, rather than direct payment.
Second, there are multiple valid things that you can do - you don't just have to pick one.
You can work on Manifest V2 bypasses and you can boycott Chrom{e,ium} and you can contact your representatives to ask them to craft regulation against this and you can promote/use financial models where you pay for stuff with money instead of eyeballs. All are useful! (especially because regulation is incredibly difficult to get write and takes a long time to build political will, draft, pass, and implement)
> ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers).
For most people, that means installing Firefox or using Safari. There are others, but the space is small. Don't listen to people, Firefox is perfectly good and most people wont see major differences.
Truth is we like to complain. It's good to push things forward and find issues that need to be fixed, not nothing is perfect. For every complaint about Firefox there's another for Chrome. You can't just switch to Brave, Edge, Opera or some other color of Chrome. Things will feel different, but really it's easy to make mountains out of molehills. So what do you care more about?
[0] short term, yes. Long term no. Classic monopoly gets lazy and rests upon its laurels
> Don't listen to people, Firefox is perfectly good and most people wont see major differences.
I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. I used Firefox exclusively for about a year and had a website not work about once a month. This included my state's unemployment portal and a small business store.
When it happens, there's no indication of why. It's only because I'm technical I thought too try it in Chrome. My non-technical family isn't going navigate that.
Don't put this on the users. The blame is 50% on web developers, 25% on Mozilla for screwing the pooch, 25% on Google themselves for advertising it so strongly across their properties.
We also need Google to stop showing annoying pop-ups every time someone goes to their homepage, Gmail, or any other site they own. They also need to stop promoting users on mobile to open links in Chrome, when the user doesn’t even have Chrome installed, and has chosen the “default browser” option 100 times already.
I’m so fed up with these nudges.
And most importantly these are anti-competitive. They are using Google's other markets to give them an unfair marketing advantage that other browsers do not have. Neither Firefox, Brave or anyone else can have these prompts on Android, Google Search. They are using an unfair advantage to take over the market against the common good.
Better yet, include some piece of code in your webpage that is dynamically loaded from e.g. EFF.org or mozilla.org.
That way, you give these organizations the power to nuke Chrome, one day.
This can also be seen as a kind of mutually assured destruction approach, to keep Google in check.
This wasn't really the point of the article, which in fact says the workaround was patched in Chrome 118.
Because the author reported it. Personally I would have told the ublock origin developers instead of google.
To what end? So Google can see how it works and still patch it?
A gift to reduce global CO2 search emissions...
I think you’re missing the point of the article.
Isn’t really about bypassing it to support the development of new extensions. It’s more just a blog about a new bug that the author found during their security research.
It’s really more a fluff piece promoting themselves than it is anything else. And to be honest, I’m fine with that.
My bigger takeaway from that article was how impressive this individual already is. They’re still a student and already finding and reporting several bugs in major platforms. Kudos to them.
Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome. I've done the pure firefox forray recently but after 6 months it gets tiresome to have 2 browsers and 3 weeks ago Ive admitted defeat for the second time and went full chrome. Who am I lying to -- market cornered, ggwp. It's like trying to eat food without paying a cent to cargill.
Treat it as isolating banking from the rest of your browsing, there are enough CVEs coming out for Chromium in spite of (or maybe because of) Google pouring billions into it.
ABNAMRO in nl, for starters. Their transaction form breaks somewhere halfway if you are not using Chrome. I've found a workaround (the transaction gets archived, so you just click on the list of transactions once more and then you can continue). It's annoying though and they do not respond to reports of it breaking. They also change the site more and more to work better on chrome so now you can no longer cut-and-paste a number of transactions in Firefox (handy during tax season) but you have to download a badly formatted CSV with way too much information in it, strip that and then you may be able to import it.
> Websites I use regularly for banking don't work outside of chrome.
What countries banks?
I am in New Zealand and have not had that problem in years.
15 years ago I had to edit my user agent string to look like IE (IIRC) for the University of Otago's website (PricewaterhouseCoopers getting lots of money for doing a really bad job)
Makes me wonder have you tried that trick? Less tiresome than switching browsers....
Let's not forget, you'll have to ditch Chromium based applications too, like discord, VScode, spotify, and whatever else is basically a chrome browser.
I've been satisfied with Firefox speed for several years, ever since Chrome manifest version 3 crap started to become reality.
I keep many browsers on my laptop and use whichever one I must for in-compatibility reasons and primarily Firefox which makes me generally a happy camper. Mac os.
Mobile is different.
I’ve run across several websites that won’t load in Safari but work great in Chrome.
One of them is my router.
Yeah, it's not Firefox that is slow, it is Google properties that are slow on Firefox. Otherwise FF is fast, or at least Chrome is just as slow or slower (judging by seeing others use it).
I mostly avoid Google websites, but when I can't, I always use Brave/Edge/Chromium on those. E.g. Google Earth is especially useless outside of Chrome-land.
Firefox (with uBO) also probably wins any realistic speed comparison simply because it still supports MV2. I really don't care how fast the ads are loaded, I prefer blocking them. Especially the most privacy invading ones (i.e. by Google).
It's 2025.
Here is a list of great browsers committed to MV2 support. If anybody from Google tries to gaslight you with "but security..." review this:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=gmail.com
and ask them why do they still support connection with so many insecure tls suites ;-)
Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/download/
Brave: https://brave.com/download/
Waterfox: https://www.waterfox.net/download/
LibreWolf: https://librewolf.net/installation/
Pale Moon: https://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml
Thorium: https://thorium.rocks/
Ungoogled Chromium: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...
There's essentially 2 browsers in that long list: Firefox and Chromium.
Everyone using Chromium as base committed to MV2 support, but that's while Chromium itself still supports MV2. What will happen when Google changes things enough that the small browsers can't merge updates in a day or two while maintaining MV2 support? I doubt Vivaldi and Brave have the resources to actually fork Chromium... not even going to mention small projects like Thorium or Ungoogle Chromium.
And the Firefox-based browsers are in a similar position. The 2 or 3 students working on Floorp can't do much if Mozilla decides to drop support and then introduces changes that breaks compatibility with old code.
Of course those browsers can decide to stop merging upstream code, but then you get a Pale Moon... even if we ignore security flaws (which are a problem for you and your machine), a visit to their forum tells me that it struggles with a few websites.
"yeah the free internet, sure, but have you considered Firefox Pocket and also woke?"
^ Every single time this comes up on HackerNews for the past decade
I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier. It's only been a couple of months, but I can't imagine going back to a browser without multi-account containers.
The only time I've used anything but firefox for the last. Well probably since netscape honestly? I am so old. Is to get the in flight entertainment to work on american, but firefox has worked for that for a few years now. People say chrome is faster and in the early 2000s I might have agreed, but now I really don't understand why anyone not on a mac or iphone isn't using Firefox. It is great.
I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox. But not nearly enough to keep me from using it on my personal machines. (My employer doesn't allow any browser except Chrome and Edge). For me, the most important feature of a browser is the web experience. I guess it should be security but I try to be careful about what I do online, regardless of what browser I'm using.
Many years ago I used to run the Firefox NoScript extension exclusively. For sites that I trusted and visited frequently I would add their domains to an exceptions list. For sites that I wasn't sure about I would load it with all scripts disabled and then selectively kept allowing scripts until the site was functional, starting with the scripts hosted on the same domain as the site I wanted to see/use.
Eventually I got too lazy to keep doing that but outside of the painstaking overhead it was by far the best web experience I ever had. I started getting pretty good at recognizing what scripts I needed to enable to get the site to load/work. Plus, uBlock Origin and annoyances filters got so good I didn't stress about the web so much any more.
But all this got me thinking, why not have the browser block all scripts by default, then have an AI agent selectively enable scripts until I get the functionality I need? I can even give feedback to the agent so it can improve over time. This would essentially be automating what I was dong myself years ago. Why wouldn't this work? Do I not understand AI? Or web technology? Or are people already doing this?
Multi-account containers are brilliant. I recommend the following extensions:
* uBlock Origin
* Privacy Badger
* Multi-Account Containers
* Flagfox
* Cookie Autodelete> I switched to Firefox and it's been wonderful. I wonder why I didn't switch earlier
Maybe because a few years ago it could be very annoying? It was mostly pretty good at rendering web pages but it had many UI problems that could really get on your nerves after a while.
For example somewhere around late 2020 or early 2021 after several years of using it as my main browser on my Mac I switched because a couple of those problems finally just got too annoying to me.
The main one I remember was that I was posting a fair bit on HN and Reddit and Firefox's spell checker had an extraordinarily high false positive rate.
This was quite baffling, actually, because Firefox uses Hunspell which is the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, MacOS, and many other free and commercial products, and it works great in those with a very low false positive rate.
Here's the ones I hit and reported: ad hominem, algorithmically, all-nighter, another's, auditable, automata, backlight, ballistically, blacksmithing, bubonic, cantina, chewable, coaxially, commenter, conferenced, counterintuitive, dominator, epicycle, ethicist, exonerations, ferrite, fineable, hatchling, impaction, implementer, implementor, inductor, initializer, intercellular, irrevocability, licensor, lifecycle, manticore, massless, measurer, meerkats, micropayments, mischaracterization, misclassification, misclassified, mistyped, mosquitos, partygoers, passthrough, per se, phosphine, plough, pre-programmed, preprogrammed, programmability, prosecutable, recertification, responder, retransmission, rotator, seatbelt, sensationalistic, shapeshifting, solvability, spectrogram, splitter, subparagraphs, subtractive, surveil, survivorship, synchronizer, tradeoffs, transactional, trichotomy, tunable, underspecified, untraceably, untyped, verifiability, verifier, webmail.
First, they are color coded / icon specific tabs, not full windows like chrome. I have used it a lot in the past when I'm doing sso testing at work, or logging into 5 or 6 different AWS accounts at the same time. It's really nice to jump from the green tab (Dev) to the red tab (prod) to check some settings or logs. They feel a lot lighter then full on chrome profiles. You can also tie each to specific proxy profiles, so in my last setup we used ssh tunnels to access different environments, so each container connected to different ssh tunnels.
The main thing holding me back is lack of pwa support, since there are a few apps that i need to use that only exist as progressive web apps on Linux. And using another browser for pwa has shown to be a bit cumbersome.
I know pwa is coming back to Firefox soon-ish.
I don't know, I switched to Safari and it was painful for like two hours and then I stopped thinking about it. The only thing I somewhat miss is the built-in page translate, but I don't need it often enough to be bothered much.
I find switching from chrome to safari essentially doing nothing. If you switched to a non-big-company owned browser, it would make sense but Apple has plenty of lock in which is as bad as chrome lock in.
I'm aware of this, but in my experience it's pretty bad. It doesn't even cover all European languages, never mind the rest of the world. For the languages it does support, it's always a lottery whether it works with that specific site or not. I've tried using it a few times, but it's not even remotely close to what Chrome does.
Hit then where it hurts would be political action, not individuals switching to Firefox, that does nothing.
like most solutions to complex societal/economic issues:
it’s almost certainly going to take both of your ideas, more diversity in the browser space and political actions. and then other actions as well.
the collective We have fallen into a trap where we consistently talk down other important ideas because we think ours is important too (and it is.) i definitely catch myself doing this far too often.
i just hope We can get back to a place where We recognize that different ideas from our own are also important and will need to be used in our effort to solve some of our issues. because so many of these cracks we’re facing will require many many many levers being pushed and pulled, not one magic silver bullet.
> Politicians follow votes.
we have enough data to show that this is not the case, in general.
A lot of people seem to believe that switching to a de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough. I think that's a psyop promoted by Google themselves. Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome. Brave, custom Chromium builds, Vivaldi, etc. are all very similar to Google Chrome, they just don't have Google spy features.
The argument that "Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD I'd expect to back up this kind of psyop, too.
> Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome
I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).
I agree, there's little to no friction in switching to Firefox and I have never, not even once, noticed a difference with websites. The same is not true for Safari.
Firefox has multiple, user-affecting, memory leaks related to Youtube (unconfirmed if just youtube), going back at least 7 years. Tab scrollbar as no option to be disabled, so I had to write CSS to get tabs into a form close to what I would like similar to chrome. Tab mute icon has no (working) option to disable the click event, so I had to write CSS to remove it.
I made some other changes, but I forget what. At least FF still has the full uBlock Origin.
The stuff INSIDE the viewport is pretty much the same across them all, but on the daily it makes a big difference how your other services integrate with the browser. Someone who is all-in with iCloud, macOS, iOS etc might find it annoying to use Firefox without their personal info like password and credit cards and bookmarks. And the same would be true I guess for Google fans switching to Safari and not having those things.
I once made a comment along these lines (de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough, as it supports the browser monoculture and inevitably makes Chrome as a browser better) and got a reply from from Brendan Eichner himself.
His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.
Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.
The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.
I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.
I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)
Though his brave is a relatively small company, they have enough resources to have developed, and continue maintaining their own low-level ad blocker, which IME has been just as effective as uBO, but is supposedly more efficient (since it's written in the R-word language and compiled into native code integrating deeply inside the browser):
I can't imagine what hoops Google would have to jump through to block third parties from integrating their own ad blockers. You don't need MV2 for that AFAIK.
I also installed Brave on my partner's iPhone and I agree there are no big qualitative differences in the blocking.
Probably for Google the easiest way to keep 3rd-parties from integrating native ad blockers is through licensing agreements for new code/modules in chromium. At this point there will be a fork of chromium, taking the latest non-adblockerblocker-licensed version and the two versions will start to diverge with time.
My point however was not that Google might one day block 3rd-parties from integrating ad-blockers in their own chromium variant. My point was that building on the chromium-base will improve the chromium-base, which will improve Chrome and additionally allow them to claim they haven't monopolized the browser market.
Genuine incompatible-by-time forks of chromium are not in Google's interest and thus Google needs to balance their competing interests of maximizing ad revenue, but also keeping Chrome a high-quality product and not being seen as a browser monopolist.
Isn't that the exact argument behind the Serenity project? I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers. Control over virtually all media consumption mustn't be in the hands of a corporation.
> I legitimately feel there is a grave issue with the internet if one wallet controls all of the actual development of our browsers.
Aside from Ladybird and Servo, it mostly is one wallet. Chrome and Firefox are both funded by Google, and Apple also receives significant funding from Google for being the default search engine in Safari.
Btw, some informal estimates at team sizes (full-time employees) of the various browsers (by people who have worked on them / are otherwise familiar):
Chrome: 1300
Firefox: 500
Safari: 100-150
Ladybird/Servo: 7-8 (each)
Which gives you an idea of why Chrome has been so hard to compete with.
The argument just doesn't hold water, though. That's like saying Y Combinator shouldn't be the only company paying for our tech forum. It's perfectly fine unless Y Combinator decides to ruin HN it somehow. And, if they did, wouldn't people just switch to one of the many HN clones overnight? That's what's known as FUD - "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". FUD is often spread about the present, but it's often just as useful to spread it about the future. "Don't use product X, the company that owns it could make it unusable someday". Part of me thinks Google keeps threatening to disable adblocking (but never actually does it) as part of a grand strategy. But part of me thinks it's just a coincidence that Google isn't capable of pulling off such a tricky psychological operation.
Has any chromium based browser committed to continue supporting MV2 or building an alternative API for ad-blockers to intercept web requests in MV3 even after the code for MV2 is removed from upstream chromium?
If not, then no, switching to another chromium based browser is not enough.
And fwiw my experience trying Brave was that the user experience was actually more different from chrome than Firefox.
Firefox only shares anonymized data with partners. Is there evidence OHTTP can be deanonymized?
Also if you don’t like advertising then hit the back button on advertising heavy sites.
“Sorry, we don’t support any browsers other than Chrome”
I agree exploiting a bug isn’t a sustainable solution. But it’s also unrealistic to think switching is viable.
Keep chrome installed and fall back iff forced to. That way the majority of usage statistics show up as other browsers so when developers are making guesses at which browser to support, those statistics will push them away from chrome.
Additionally: you would be surprised how infrequently you have to switch to chrome
Btw, the 'website requires chrome browser' problem is often solved if you just make Firefox user agent say it is Chrome.
There's one site I have to switch to Firefox for. And it's a big one that handles a lot of money, so that's kind of surprising. Can't log into their site in chrome, no matter how hard I try. Nor edge.
Find who is responsible for such sites and send them strongly-worded emails. If it's a commerce site, tell them they just lost a potential customer. In my experience it's usually the trendchasing web developers who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are trying to convince the others in the organisation to use "modern" (read: controlled by Google) features and waste time implementing these changes --- instead of the "deprecated" feature that's been there for decades and will work in just about any browser, and the management is usually more driven by $$$ so anything that affects the bottom line is going to get their attention. I've even offered to "fix" their site for free to make it more accessible.
By that logic attempting to change anything at all is not viable; e pur si muove.
>the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome
History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!
There's no detour for politics.
>like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently
But that was the whole point. They were marketing to children. They still haven't recovered from that backlash. Anheuser-Busch took a pretty damning financial hit and it sent a message to all the other companies not to pull this kind of stunt because it's bad for business. Changing their behavior was the entire point.
> History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another
The South African apartheid regime was brought down by boycotts.
The Israeli genocide regime will suffer the same fate if there is any justice left in the world.
Boycotts are very powerful. Users boycotting ads is dismantling the surveillance web.
South Africa didn’t have the U.S. Government and its allies actively propping it up, and punishing anyone who tried to boycott it.
Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.