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I just installed GrapheneOS on my pixel 9 this weekend, and was surprised the default Vanadium browser doesn’t have Google AdSense ripped out or an ad-blocker as default.
(To verify, try visiting slashdot.org with Vanadium, vs. Iron Fox with uBlock Origin).
As a result, I set IronFox to my default browser and am loving it. Why does GrapheneOS not have an ad-blocking solution in the default build? Seems like a big feature they could brag about.
Im shocked they haven’t banned this.
For a short time Firefox mobile got rid of extensions and man I have not felt so betrayed by a corporation as I did seeing those "update"s.
I swear Mozilla always does its best to ruin any good brand image they have.
It’s gotta be a secret term to their default google search contract or something.
Bad time for Firefox.
Atleast they brought back Extensions shortly
Fuck chrome.
This alone is why it’s my main mobile browser but man they could really improve the UI. it’s very sluggish with animations and components that aren’t material for no good reason. the browser itself is also a bit laggy but i can excuse the page rendering.
it’s probably impossible to meaningfully implement, but if I could make a userChrome.css for the mobile app I would definitely enjoy it more
I only have two extensions…
… and yet, that alone makes me loathe any other mobile browser that doesn’t support them.
Consent-O-Matic is nice too, clicks through cookie popups automatically
“Video Background Play Fix” is also nice if you are a YouTube user. Background playing of Videos without the need for Premium.
I was using a friend’s phone for checking something online the other day, and I was horrified at how much screen real estate was wasted on ads. I’ve become far too used to having adblock on mobile, and I had forgotten how bad it can be.
I always find it jarring, because I’m so surprised that people put up with it and just accept it as normal. I get that I am an extreme outlier when it comes to my willingness to tinker and also my stubbornness that makes me extremely willing to spend a heckton of time to solve problems that are annoying me, but for many people, switching to a different browser and using uBlock would be trivially easy, but they just don’t, even if they know that’s an option. I don’t understand the mindset that leads to it.
The “A” is for “apathy”.
Add bypass paywall clean and Augmented Steam and you have mine
You couldn’t link me to the exact bypass extension you use could you please?
JShelter and uBlock Origin here 🫡
ToXCancel is nice too sometimes
As I’m not into microblogging I kinda don’t need it, but yeah, I get why it might be useful.
Similar for Instagram and tik tok https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/social-switch/
Libredirect generalizes the concept and implements it for a variety of websites
I have that on Desktop, but I think that perhaps when I was installing various add-ons for Firefox mobile, this wasn’t yet available as a mobile add-on. Whatever the reason is for me not having it installed on my mobile, I thank you for bringing it to my attention; I have now installed it.
Combine with uninstalling all YouTube apps
Have you tried ReVanced? I love having SponsorBlock, DeArrow thumbnails, and the ability to remove YT Shorts entirely from the app. The YouTube patches are amazing!
pipepipe app is much better YouTube client and it comes with ad blocking and sponsorBlock.
And yet the GrapheneOS people recommend their own “Vanadium” hardened version of Chromium instead, for reasons I don’t understand.
It is explained here https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
They don’t explicitly mention Firefox but:
"Chromium-based browsers like Vanadium provide the strongest sandbox implementation, leagues ahead of the alternatives. "
and
"Chromium has decent exploit mitigations, unlike the available alternatives. "
Since I myself lack the knowledge and skills to judge this, I have to trust the word of the developers.
Edit, correction. They do mention Firefox
“Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they’re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface.”
Merely asserting something and explaining it to my satisfaction (as a developer myself) are two different things. I don’t want to have to read through both codebases myself, but I would have liked the Graphene OS devs to cite some examples to prove their point.
Seriously. I’ve never heard of firefox being more vulnerable than chrome. It could be, but realistically not many groups are looking for exploits in a browser with 3% market share
And the complete inability to block ads is just a non issue. Ok.
vanadium has adblocking
Really? Didn’t seem to to me; I just installed latest GrapheneOS on my pixel 9 this weekend, and Vanadium definitely let Google Adsense crap all over many sites I visited.
Is there a way to enable effective ad blocking that I missed?
How does that work, without any extensions?
I wish the full page translation works for Taiwan mandarin. It can do China-nese but not Taiwanese or HKnese.
It’s a shame they’ve trashed Firefox on iOS. Doing anything involving the home page takes over a second. Closing a tab and reshowing the Home Screen, even just showing the Home Screen without closing a tab takes ages.
they’ve trashed
Maybe blame your shitty iPhone that forces every browser to use Webkit instead of Mozilla/Firefox.
Apple is the one blocking you from having Firefox. Webkit with a different skin is all you ever had to begin with, because apple is a huge bag of cocks
Just stick with safari. All IOS web browsers only use WebKit anyway. You can use extensions on safari like uBlock Lite or AdGuard. Works well for me.
I’ve been using Brave on iOS. I haven’t looked into extensions but it has an adblock built-in, and it seems to run pretty well.
Brave is owned by a horrible dude. I’d recommend Orion by Kagi instead. It supports desktop extensions for both Chromium and Firefox. The ones I use at least function perfectly fine.
I did mention Brave to try to elicit different recommendations. I’ll likely give Orion a try soon, although it does seem newer and less stable from what I’ve seen just looking it up now.
That being said, is there anything about that guy other than his trying to make money by tying crypto wallets and so on into the Brave browser?
I don’t get why you’ve been downvoted. Asking for more information is perfectly fine.
Brave has had a history of really slimy behaviour.They used Tom Scott’s name, without his consent or involvement to ask for crypto donations. They’ve hijacked referral links, and then gone all “whoops that was an accident.” You literally can’t do that kind of thing by accident.
Brendan Eich was caught donating $1000 (in two batches of $500, so hardly an accident) to California Proposition 8 in 2008. When called out on this, he doubled down on it, and shortly after he resigned from Mozilla. After that he founded Brave, and gathered money from investors. Among those investors was Peter Thiel’s investment fund “Founders Fund.” Thiel being co-founder of PayPal alongside Elon Musk and others, and is well known for the dystopian horror company that is Palantir.
So that’s the kind of company Brave is.
Thank you for all the links, but nothing is more persuasive than his Wikipedia page.
I guess I could look past one or two of those things. But his support for Prop 8 and his publicly criticizing masking during the pandemic are big no-gos for me. One shows that he lacks basic empathy, and the other shows that he thinks highly of his uninformed opinion, even to the point of betting other people’s lives on it.
Living up to your username, I see!
He supports and donates to anti-LGBTQ organizations and right-wing groups. He’s a piece of shit.
If that’s true then I will switch today.
Both are just Safari reskinned, right? Or did that change?
Every browser on iOS is but Brave somehow has baked in adblocking. I use it often especially for YouTube because it blocks ads there but can’t get any other way, I’m aware of, to block YouTube ads on iOS.
Everything ok iOS uses WebKit.
If i am not mistaken google say “it’s for stability” Stability my ass, if i want my browser being unstable with extensions then i’il do it, fuck google.
laughs in AdGuard
Still love the 🦊 though.
With uBlock you can remove cosmetics and some page elements, the best setup is nextdns/pihole/adguard + uBlock origin
What? I really thought Chrome on Android supports extentions. I’ve been using Kiwi browser, which is based on Chrome, for a couple of years and it’s had extention support all the time…
I want to get away from any Chrome based browser, but for android I really can’t stand anything other than Kiwi. I’ve tried all non-chrome based browsers and they all feel like shit to use. Though I’ve recently had issues with Kiwi not playing nice with websites in my country , Sweden, and the ID verification app used for many things here and the only browser I’ve found where it always works is Ecosia. That’s weird since it’s based on Firefox but no other Android based Firefox browsers play well with the ID thing either, not Firefox itself, Fennec, IronFox etc. only Ecosia… But the Ecosia version is very barebones and I’d never use it as my main browser.
What’s interesting is that Google is developing a special version of chrome on Android that supports extensions
https://www.androidauthority.com/try-new-chrome-for-android-with-extensions-3569268/
After they neutered extensions with manifest v3, why even bother?
But it’s kinda useless because it doesn’t support the most important extension: uBlock Origin.
It did work tho? I was able to install ubock origin and it worked fine
I mean, I haven’t tried it, but since Google is forcing their limited version of Manifest v3, you can only get “uBlock Origin Lite” on the Chrome Extension Store.
It does block some ads, but it’s quite limited compared to proper uBlock Origin.
Huh I’m using unlock origin on edge which also uses manifest v3 now I think? I haven’t seen any performance hits or more ads
Hmm, can you right-click on a webpage and then select an element to block?
That’s one of the limitations in Chrome, that it’s not possible to add filter rules dynamically anymore, which also means they can’t auto-update the filter lists without shipping a new version of the uBlock Origin, if I understand correctly.
The other limitation is that the number of static filter rules that can be shipped with an extension is rather limited. So, it’s possible that if you mainly use popular webpages, that you’re still generally covered, but that some cosmetic rules fell by the wayside, or that you occasionally see ads on smaller webpages.
But it is also well possible that Edge allows for a higher number of static filter rules. That should be trivial to change.
Well, and they could still support Manifest v2 or might support additions to the v3 standard, so that dynamic loading of filter rules is possible again. (I believe, Mozilla has already specified additions for that, which Microsoft could just implement.)
Been using Cromite as my daily driver browser. It doesn’t allow “real” extensions, but I guess devs built in Adblock Plus, which is really neat.
Def wish I could have Old Reddit Redirect and my dark reader apps on it tho. Keep a Firefox browser around primarily for that.
There’s a native dark mode in Cromite. Go to
about:flagsThe setting isAuto Dark Mode for Web Contentsand it has a few different settings to try.…And while I love dark reader, it’s quite chonky, even on desktop.
As for old Reddit, I think you can edit host files on android?
FYI you can’t edit the hosts file on Android without root
“I think you can edit host files on android?”
Hadn’t considered this as a possibility. Thanks for mentioning it — I’ll have a look into it when I get a chance to. Even if it doesn’t end up being possible, it sounds worth looking into.
Orly??? I’ll def need to look up the hosts file bit.
