For exactly the reasons you state - Google doesn't want ad blockers in their browser.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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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 havenβt 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 β 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.
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
The only Chromium based browser for android that I know can run extensions is Kiwi, most of webstore extensions works well on it.
I love Kiwi Browser. Only downside is the developer seems to update it every 5 months or so.
Kiwi Next has more frequent updates, last time I checked
I use samsung browser (chromium based) it have some extensions and built-in adblocker.
Firefox or Kiwi. These are your options for extensions
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.
I guess it is just not a popular feature on mobile. Most smartphone users don't even know what a browser is, so ensuring addon support seems to be very low priority for Mozilla. Even a switch hidden somewhere in the about:config page in Firefix Nightly would be enough. These extension collections are the most user-hostile way of extension support possible. I just switched to Kiwi because of that mainly.
I think there are some Firefox forks with the entire extension store enabled, but I have not looked into this.
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.
If the extension you want to install is also on github, you oftentimes also get some easy instructions on how to install the necessary collection for this extension.
Still not very usable for casual users. I think on F-Droid there are some fairly uptodate Firefox forks with all extensions unlocked
As I said, I wound up on Fennec F-Droid to get the unsupported extension; but if you have any recommendations on browsers on F-Droid that can streamline the process, I would certainly be interested in hearing about them!
I use Kiwi out of necessity. The modern web is unusable without some way to block ads, cookie popups, and sticky elements. It's especially worse on mobile because every other website wants you to use their app.
Yandex browser also has chrome extensions and is actually supported by a big company (that may or may not be affiliated with Russian government, but whether or not that affects you personally depends on your threat model).
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.
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.
For exactly the reasons you state - Google doesn't want ad blockers in their browser.
firefox
Kiwi supports custom extensions
@zephyr I use kiwi browser. Don't know how secure it is though. Google doesn't want ad blocker on their browser it seems.
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