this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
1253 points (98.5% liked)

Technology

59374 readers
7248 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
1253
Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads (www.windowscentral.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
301 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 186 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (38 children)

I think some people overestimate how many will migrate to Firefox in the near future over this.

  • High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.
  • Just as many Firefox users like Firefox, lots of Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don't want to lose that.
  • The kind of tech-aware person who'd switch over this is much more likely to have seen the news months ago and taken action already.

As fun as it is to imagine an Adpocalypse shocking the masses and pushing them to try out alternatives to big tech, it's also way too optimistic, I feel.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 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 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 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.

load more comments (35 replies)