8mo ago

Google dropping ublock origin represents a flawless David vs Goliath victory for its developer

45 comments

Switch to firefox
- Never stopped using it in the first place. :)
- what's this from?
- These guys are the real winners in all this
- No.
  
  Then feel free to suffer from and be manipulated by targeted advertisement.
- Which we’ll soon be a paid browser if the US breaks up Google and they can’t send any money to Firefox anymore.
  
  You may want to educate yourself before spreading unnecessary FUD. Firefox is free and open source, and always has been. There's no danger in Firefox becoming a paid browser because even if they tried, it would just be forked and maintained by another community or group.
  Mozilla does have a for-profit arm called the Mozilla Corporation, and they manage the money received from Google and others. But that doesn't mean Firefox is going to become paid even if Google gets broken up by the antitrust efforts of the US government.
  
  Although thats probably not whats going to happen if google gets broken up but I‘ll still happily pay for firefox just for the sake of breaking up google.
  Death to megacorporations.
  
  honestly? Id pay for it
  
  This might be a best case scenario. It won’t happen, Mozilla has been turned into a corporate funds receiver for years. That CEO compensation doesn’t pay for itself. Imagine paying for actual software engineering work.
  
  Eh, I would think that if they're under fire for being a monopoly any non monopolistic actions like funding their rivals will be pretty well received.
  
  worst case scenario, I download a pirated copy ¯(ツ)/¯ (though before that i'll prob. just switch to LibreWolf)

You gotta explain this one, that parable doesn't fit the situation in the way it's typically used
- This is clearly about all the youtube advertisement changes lately. (though maybe with a dolllop of not being happy about their other ads being blocked either) I've not seen a single one on FF with Ublock, no slowdown, no nothing. He was (as I understand it) making changes as needed to stay ahead of or abreast of them. (I already wasn't using their browser long before this.)
  He beat them. They didn't crush him with their technical prowess and all their genius engineers, they didn't find a way to legally challenge him (I'm sure they had their lawyers working on it), they didn't find a way to outmaneuver him, the only thing they could do is ban his extension from being used on their browser. Because they literally could not force their shit down our throats as long as we were using it.
  So I guess, maybe not a beat for beat fit for the parable, but he's very much the little guy, and they very much are the gigantic IT megacorp, so I think it was a glorious victory.
  
  I'd call it a pyrrhic victory at best. It's like if Ukraine got Russia to use their nukes on them and there was no response from the rest of the world. Sure, you got them to use their strongest weapon, but you still got nuked and they'll continue as usual.
  
  Manifest V3 was well on its way to being implemented before the aggressive youtube advertisement push. It was well known (to people who cared) it would kill uBlock back in 2019.
  Here's an article:
  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/google-begins-testing-extension-manifest-v3-in-chrome-canary/
  Discussion on the uBlock subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/dunod2/google_begins_testing_extension_manifest_v3_which/
  
  You're kind of assuming people will stop using Chrome as a consequence, but i just don't think that's the case.
  David didn't slay Goliath, Goliath just walked away and took command of David's army, leaving David to play with his rocks.
  
  Fair enough :)
  Thanks for your perspective and time in the response

45 comments