Comment by zulban

"Because that's what it means to be a hacker."

Sure. But to me "hacking" this cat and mouse game is not very compelling. I feel like I've seen a thousand articles exactly like this over the years. This won't work in 4 months.

"It was patched in Chrome 118 by ..."

Or already?

>But I don't know how to make an adblocker, so I decided to report the issue to Google in August 2023. It was patched in Chrome 118 by checking whether extensions using opt_webViewInstanceId actually had WebView permissions. For the report, I netted a massive reward of $0. They decided it wasn't a security issue, and honestly, I agree, because it didn't give extensions access to data they didn't already have.

The effort to overcome the community's chance at discovering the workaround?

> except that for a majority of users, windows is where their applications are at - such as gaming, word processing, or some other thing.

Until you switch to linux you won't understand how inferior your windows setup always was.

It's hard for us to tell you what you are missing out on, you simply need to experience it.

I mostly game in a Windows 10 VM running on my Linux desktop computer. Single keypress to switch to Linux workspace.

This is not because Linux gaming is horrible broken, but rather it gives me a fully separate leisure desktop, and my main Linux desktop is work only.

It also gives me 100% compatibility, unlike wine.

> People who say "just switch" to linux hasn't done it for their family/friends.

When we say so here, we are telling you to switch.

Nobody should be forcing anything on friends/family.

I always suggest MacOS for friends/family for ease of support. I would never recommend Windows to anyone.

That's so much less true nowadays,

Web has become the default platform, where most people run most of their app/spend most of their time. Even Microsoft has had no choice but to embrace it, and Outlook (as in, the one from Microsoft office) is now a web first app (normal outlook is rebranded "classic" and we all know where this is heading, for better or worse). In a way, that makes switching OS much easier.

If you add to that that Windows itself is getting major visual overhauls from version to version (sometimes even within) it's not like sticking with it protects you from having to learn different UX paradigms and habits.

And regarding gaming, well, linux with Proton runs games faster than Windows nowadays, that's how little Microsoft cares about gamers/how good Valve is (depending on how you look at it), but the fact of the matter remains.

> (steamOS), which isn't available to a general PC

Most of its secret sauce is either in Proton or upstreamed into Wine, DXVK, SDL, etc. All available to a general PC.

Unless your focus is competitive online games, which often come with Windows-only anti-cheats, you've got a huge catalogue of great games playable on Linux distros. I did the switch about four months ago and I'm not missing Windows, the only pain point has been Nvidia drivers and I'll be solving that by switching vendors.

Proton is available for desktop Steam as well, just pick your distro and go.

I disagree that that's the majority of users.

The majority of users either use only web applications, or web applications and Microsoft Office.

The true majority of users are on mobile.

Windows is only unreplaceable for gamers. Which is fine, because Windows is a toy anyway.

You can always tell how much someone has tried Linux based on how they talk about it.

The day Linux will be used more than Windows, it will be in more trouble than Windows will.

Threat actors are attracted by the most used system.

Fedora Bazzite it's Steam OS. And with Flatpak and Lutris you can have that setup everywhere, but some distros optimize the setings and compilations for the desktop better than Others:

- Solus OS

- Fedora Bazzite

- Catchy OS

Fallout 4 is running better on Linux than on Windows these days.

It's a oui-sequitur for sure.

I don’t know. Eventually you read enough of this stuff and you would rather the next breath be, take leadership on a real solution. To me it’s a “sequitur” to say, the biggest fuck you is to convince people to stop using Chrome, not to fix bugs for their extremely highly paid engineers for free.

Right back at you. If you think my comment is a non-sequitur, maybe you didn't read the article?

>In your Windows vs. Linux example, Linux just doesn't do a lot of things very well on the UI/UX side of things (e.g., window management, driver support, an out of the box experience).

That judgement confuses me a lot. Window management, drivers and out of the box experience has been much better in Linux for the last 10 years in my experience. Sure, there are some companies that don't ship drivers for Linux or the configuration software is not fully fledged. Window management has almost always been better in Linux, but of course depends on the WM. Windows innovated one nice feature in Vista (aero snap) which most desktop environments has implemented since.

If you install Fedora, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, what are you lacking from that out of the box experience? Generally no driver installation needed, and no cleaning up of bloatware.

I wasn't writing about consumers though. I was writing about "hackers" who might read this article and try this hack.

Firefox is not a Chromium fork

It supports keeping long term history so you can find a page you visited years ago from the history search in the address bar. Chrome/Google likes when you have to search for it and Brave has inherited that.

For me, I like being able to set a default font/size/colour for all websites as an override. Chromium browsers don't do that out of the box.

I like that it quarantines most of Facebook's shenanigans with cookies and the like.

I can't compare Brave's adblock to uBlock Origin, but it's probably good enough.

It doesn't do crypto bullshit, for example.

Is this on Linux? Do you have an example of a website where Yubikey does not work? I'm curious, because I use Firefox on Linux for years, also for work, and never hit a site where my Yubikeys would not work. (I'm also using Google Meet regularly for work from Firefox without problems)

about:config

Search for accel, look up the 'layout...' key, set it to true.

Also, set the webgl force enabled... key to true too.

+1 to this. This is probably the only thing that keeps me from ditching Chrome/Brave and going back to Firefox.

> except firefox is pretty bad nowadays.

Pretty bad as in that isn't true?

Firefox is the option that doesn't intentionally leave users vulnerable to hostile adtech. Firefox is the option with containers. Past that it is performant and reliable under a wide variety of user loads and platforms.

or Pretty bad as in Firefox+forks are better than the alternatives?

It is true that some unfortunate default options were recently added to Firefox configs.

Those options are unfortunate because they are variants of anti-user options baked into Chromium - options created to keep Chromium users susceptible to big-tech's worst intentions.

How? Seriously, I keep seeing this argument against using Firefox, but as a long time user I fail to see any glaring issues with it.

The only websites that break for me are those I broke on purpose by using ad-block.

I browse the web daily, and the number of website that ever gave me trouble on Firefox can be counted on a single hand. The website compatibility issue is vastly overblown.

I've switched to Firefox 3 years ago now after using Chrome for a decade. The list of things I missed from chrome:

- Tab grouping, now added in Firefox as of a few months ago

- built-in translation services. Firefox is slowly introducing this, but its missing many languages. In the meantime, a translation extension works fine.

- Google products operating better... but the issue here is obvious and outside of Firefox's control.

- various micro quirks from random sites I might find during research. Nothing functionality breaking, just clear examples where there was likely hard coded chrome user agent business.

- the occasional extension on Chrome that didn't have a Firefox port. This happened maybe 4 times total.

so, 2 things that are fixed (or close to), one anti-competitive measure, and the 2 smallest nitpicks I could imagine. I don't know what the fuss is that justifies Firefox being considered vastly inferior to Chrome these days. Even thsoe small issues are far offset by the ability to have proper adblock. Using Adblock on Chrome for my work computer is miserable.

FF is my daily driver and I don’t see any issues. Do you have examples?

Firefox has been my main browser for almost 10 years and I haven't encountered any challenges other than availability of plugins, but even that has been a very rare issue.

No, firefox is great nowadays.