this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads (www.windowscentral.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The uBlock Origin chrome extension ~~has~~ had 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.

Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I thought about mentioning that. But the comparison goes both ways. Less than 1% of Chrome users switching to Firefox could still mean an increase in Firefox users of over 10%, if I remember my numbers correctly. That'd be a sweet boost for most products.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ya, it’d still be huge for Firefox, but what I’m really getting at is that even with this change, Chrome is going nowhere. They’re the big fish, they can afford to make these kinds of changes, because the people who care are a very small minority.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

To be fair, nerds will tell their tech-illiterate friends about this change and probably influence them enough to consider it. Especially when it's something as easy as downloading an application.

It's much easier to switch a browser then it is to stop using Google, Facebook, etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Depends on their methodology. Sure, a huge proportion of those are users who haven't heard of uBO, but we're forgetting a lot of caveats:

  1. Electron exists and lots of apps are built on top of it and identify as "Chrome". Judging by the numbers most have been weeded out, but some edge cases do visit more sites so they end up in the count.
  2. A lot of workplaces mandate the browser, which is often Chrome. This also gets counted.
  3. A not insignificant amount of Firefox users change their useragent to Chrome.

All of these skew the numbers towards Chrome. Some Chrome users use a different adblocker which lowers the uBO statistic.