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Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

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1034 points deryilz | 4 comments | 12 Jul 25 19:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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al_borland ◴[12 Jul 25 20:51 UTC] No.44545060[source]▶
Even if bigs exists to work around what Google is doing, that isn’t the right way forward. If people don’t agree with Google move, the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome (and all Chromium browsers). Hit them where it hurts and take away their monopoly over the future direction of the web.
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phendrenad2 ◴[12 Jul 25 21:09 UTC] No.44545185[source]▶
A lot of people seem to believe that switching to a de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough. I think that's a psyop promoted by Google themselves. Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome. Brave, custom Chromium builds, Vivaldi, etc. are all very similar to Google Chrome, they just don't have Google spy features.

The argument that "Google still controls Chromium so it's not good enough" is exactly the kind of FUD I'd expect to back up this kind of psyop, too.

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sensanaty ◴[12 Jul 25 21:36 UTC] No.44545393[source]▶
> Firefox is different enough from Chrome that it's a big jump for people who are used to Chrome

I find this notion completely baffling. I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari more or less daily cause I test in all 3, and other than Safari feeling clunkier and in general less power-user friendly, I can barely tell the difference between the 3, especially between chrome and FF (well, other than uBlock working better in FF anyways).

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const_cast ◴[12 Jul 25 21:48 UTC] No.44545480[source]▶
I agree, there's little to no friction in switching to Firefox and I have never, not even once, noticed a difference with websites. The same is not true for Safari.
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maest ◴[12 Jul 25 21:54 UTC] No.44545515[source]▶
There are definitely website that do not support Firefox, especially in the US.

Whole portions of the Verizon website, for example. Or the website of a well known kindergarden I was researching recently.

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1. const_cast ◴[12 Jul 25 22:10 UTC] No.44545631[source]▶
I'm sure they exist, I've just never seen them. I use banking and websites like Netflix, too. And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.

I think it's a case of yes, it does work, but web developers don't think so, so they implement checks just for kicks.

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2. sensanaty ◴[12 Jul 25 22:31 UTC] No.44545736[source]▶
> And, if I had to wager, you could bypass a lot of this "doesn't work on Firefox" by just changing your user agent.

Indeed, even in the codebase at $JOB that I'm responsible for, we have had some instances where we randomly check if people are in Chrome before blocking a browser API that has existed for 2 decades and been baseline widely available. These days 99% of features that users actually care about are pretty widely supported cross-browser, and other than developer laziness there's literally no reason why something like a banking app shouldn't work in any of the big 3.

I guarantee you that if you set your `userAgent` to a Chrome one (or even better yet, a completely generic one that covers all browsers simultaneously, cause most of the time the implementation of these `isChrome` flags is just a dead simple regex that looks for the string `chrome` anywhere in the userAgent), all problems you might've experienced before would vanish, except for perhaps on Google's own websites (though I've never really had issues here other than missing things like those image blur filters in Google Meet, which always felt like a completely artificial, anti-competitive limitation)

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3. glandium ◴[13 Jul 25 00:13 UTC] No.44546357[source]▶
Where did "check feature, not browser name" go?
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4. thayne ◴[13 Jul 25 03:24 UTC] No.44547238{3}[source]▶
Some developers are lazy. Some probably don't know that that is the right way to do it. There is a lot of legacy code from when checking user agents was more acceptable. It is much more difficult for server code to know the capabilities of the client (although in practice this isn't usually much of an issue).

Also, sometimes the feature exists so the feature check is positive, but there is a bug in one browser that breaks your functionality, so you put in a user agent check. Then the bug gets fixed, but the user agent check isn't removed for years. I've seen that happen many times.