I love Chromium on Android, but not having uBlock origin makes me stick with Firefox (or Mull).
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For exactly the reasons you state - Google doesn’t want ad blockers in their browser.
Wonder why they haven’t nuked them on desktop Chrome then, where extensions are a plenty?
Is mobile a much more juicy fruit for their advertisers, or is it like said elsewhere in here more a technical thing?
Wonder why they haven’t nuked them on desktop Chrome then, where extensions are a plenty?
Extensions are so popular on PC browsers, that Google could really jeopardize their dominant market share, if they were to completely remove extension support. The press would be on it for weeks and there could be a real hit on user numbers.
I think that Google rather tolerates the small number of users who use extensions and doesn’t want bad PR for Chrome on PC.
But I wouldn’t be surprised, when Google tries this in the future, when their browser market share is over 90%.
The game is different for mobile though – here we have a much bigger majority of unexperienced users who likely have never heard of browser extensions or such possibilities as easy-one-click-installation of ad-blockers.
I suppose a good canary on that then would be Google taking away the manual setting of PrivateDNS and making it only their DNS, in the name of some security threat/other reason.
Probably because the cat is already out of the bag there. Hard to reign them back in and they’d have tons of bad press if they do that.
But what I don’t get is why doesn’t Microsoft or someone large like that bundle extensions into their browser. I know Samsung has app based ones but I wish it could be built in and have ublock origin etc
fair point!
Outside Chrome, the answer is that the extension support is a very big and fragile (hard to maintain) patch for Chromium.
Here’s a list of browsers with extensions:
- Kiwi and Yandex browser support most Chrome extensions
- Firefox, Mozilla’s Reference Browser and Firefox forks support most Firefox extensions, but you need to make a “collection” if you want more variety than the default list
- Samsung Internet supports some content blockers as app-based extensions
- SmartCookieWeb, Berry Browser, Sleipnir support userscripts
- Many other browsers also have some form of tracker and/or ad blocking
I just use Firefox and ublock anyways, since chromium has a neat monopoly on the web. A monopoly on browser tech is terrible for the web.
I was an avid Firefox user back 15 years ago, when the Windows program would gobble up all the ram.
Chrome was so light and quick, like everybody else, I switched.
About 5 years ago, a new Firefox came out and I gave it a try and never looked back. So many neat plug ins! And uBlock on my phone!
Unfortunately, I’ve also found Firefox to have a few breaking bugs that make the experience basically unusable in mobile.
Things like the browser engine(?) crashing, causing the page to be soft-locked on a blank page, and running poorly compared to its other counterparts.
Which is rather a shame, since it would be much more usable and promising if they fixed those issues.
Weird, what device? I have a fold 4 and it’s been pretty solid, save for this occasional URL bug.
Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Not the newest device, but works fine.
That should be fine, I was on an s9 and it was pretty solid on that. Sorry you are running into issues! (Keep that note 9 as long as possible, I still miss the lack of expandable storage and having a headphone jack on my device)
I find it strange that you’re having this issue. I haven’t had this issue on my OnePlus 3T, Note9, or Pixel 7 Pro using Fennec F-Droid or Mull (FOSS forks of Firefox)
No such issues here on my Fold 4. Do you have an example of a specific website where it crashes on?
It’s not a website issue, but a browser issue, that seems to be related to switching between multi-tasking. From the looks of things, either the browser or the OS kills the page, which then doesn’t resume properly for some reason.
Extensions were a thing well before Chromium and I’m sure even the developers wanted them, so we got extensions.
There’s never been a precedent for extensions on mobile and Google knows they can get away without, because if they do they’ll have a hard time taking it back. And they really don’t want everyone to have ad blockers on mobile because they know mobile ads is what brings in the cash, and they know mobile is one of the places where ad blockers would be the most useful and effective because the ads are so intrusive and annoying.
Kiwi supports custom extensions
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I’d strongly prefer FF, but since they yoinked the Bypass Paywalls extension, I’ve been taking a look at Kiwi. Eventually once Manifest V3 goes though I’ll want to move to FF regardless, so I’m hesitant to consider Kiwi as a permanent solution though.
Firefox, barely. There are like 18 extensions unless you run Nightly and jump through a bunch of hoops.
I am puzzled that this situation has persisted for years now. It seems like Mozilla doesn’t really want extensions on mobile either.
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It’s incredibly difficult to get the non-mobile-approved extensions added to Firefox. I remember it took me a couple of hours to get it configured and I had to change my browser to the nightly version, which I did not want to do for stability reasons.
It was even more difficult to install “unsupported” browser extensions. I had to install a very old version of Fennec F-Droid, install the extension, then update to the most current version of Fennec to keep the extension. Through trial and error across several different Firefox versions, I probably wasted 3 hours getting it set up on my phone.
If you are not motivated and tech savvy (ish), the chances of getting a non-supported extension on Firefox are quite slim.
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I just block ads via dns (next dns, set in android network and internet settings)
