Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

176

sspeckx about 3 hours ago 109 commentsRead Article on 9to5google.com

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Discussion (109 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

throwatdem12311•about 2 hours ago

Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives.

Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking.

Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.

rpdillon•about 1 hour ago

Brave has an interesting approach where they have added core support for four key MV2 extensions to the core of the browser engine, bypassing MV3 entirely.

> Update: As of v1.81, we host the following Manifest V2 (MV2) extensions on Brave’s backend: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript. These extensions operate independently from the equivalent versions that are currently present on the Chrome Web Store, and have to be downloaded separately. Users can download and enable these 4 extensions from the brave://settings/extensions/v2 page.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

throwatdem12311•about 1 hour ago

I just don’t see this being sustainable long term when you’re upstream is doing everything they can to sabotage you. This is a huge maintenance burden for Brave and eventually there might be a breaking change introduced by Google that just makes this approach no longer tenable.

Mozilla is extremely friendly to content blockers, and does everything they can to make sure they are well supported as first class citizens.

insanitybit•2 minutes ago

How is Google doing "everything they can to sabotage you"? MV2's deprecation timeline was set in 2021, slipping further repeatedly.

dizhn•about 1 hour ago

The extensions are in addition to their own included ad and other nuisance blocking features. I've been testing migrating from Firefox to Brave Origin (the paid fork with no crypto features that has a free linux build) and it works pretty well without any extensions.

Yesterday I wanted to get a brave search api key on the free tier and they require a credit card even for that. That pissed me off a bit but still gonna test the browser a little bit more. Firefox is really pissing me off and I don't want to keep using it forever just because there is no other browser engine. Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable.

entropie•15 minutes ago

I used brave a bit and really liked it.

But its obvious that these guys are semi shady and they will show sooner or later. I liked chrome derviates and used them over a decade. I got tired of feeling forced to switch after vivaldi/brave so I went the firefox way last year.

The circle is completed.

OptionOfT•about 1 hour ago

And sadly, Firefox on iOS is the only browser that doesn't have a the possibility to run an Adblocker. Safari can run uBlock Origin. Brave had one built-in. Hell, even Edge has Adblock Plus.

Does Mozilla have a contract with Google to not build one in as part of the search contract?

9999gold•about 1 hour ago

They allow extensions on the Android version. But yeah, on iOS I had to switch to Orion. It seems FF for iOS doesn’t get much attention.

aleqs•about 1 hour ago

Firefox on Android supports ublock, not sure why it wouldn't support it on iOS

jmcphers•37 minutes ago

It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. Firefox on iOS is just a skinned version of WebKit/Safari. See 2.5.6:

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...

hoistbypetard•about 1 hour ago

What?

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/mobile/focus/

The only thing I use Firefox on iOS for *is* its ad blocker.

ScoobleDoodle•44 minutes ago

This links to “Firefox Focus” which is different in the iOS App Store than “Firefox”. I had no idea.

This Firefox Focus on iOS does effectively block adds on a recipe site unlike plain Firefox. I just did a cursory head to head test on the same recipe site url.

Thank you for sharing this!

qzw•about 1 hour ago

I use it on iOS daily and there’s no ad blocker. The page you linked only mentions tracking blocking. If you actually have ad blocking enabled, I’m sure a lot of us would love to hear how you did it.

drnick1•about 1 hour ago

> iOS

If free computing and user control are a priority for you, consider switching to GrapheneOS. You get better security than iOS, a UI/UX that does not assume you are mildly retarded, and full freedom to run any program from any source, including IronFox (a hardened Firefox fork).

sheept•about 1 hour ago

As you alluded to, many Chromium forks (notable exception is Ungoogled) are backed by tech companies. There's already plenty of intentional changes they maintain in their forks, like Privacy Sandbox,[0] so I don't think preserving support for v2 is a large hurdle for them.

[0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...

markstos•about 1 hour ago

Google described Manifest V2 as significant tech debt with new bugs still found there. Either they are lying or it's a non-trivial feature set to continue to support.

So will be interesting to see how many other browsers actually do keep this support alive.

OkayPhysicist•16 minutes ago

A trillion dollar company? Lying? That's beyond the pale. Google has never done anything against my interests. They're always sooooooo honest in their communications.

cute_boi•about 1 hour ago

We can use helium. It works fine.

abtinf•about 1 hour ago

Someone ought to build a browser that is designed from the ground up to treat the web for what it is: the most hostile ecosystem on the planet.

uBlock/uMatrix functionality should be built into the core. Every domain and PSF should be sandboxed to its own profile. User agents and many js queries should return standard responses. Forcing display of video controls should be trivial. Manipulating pages to show/hide elements and customize feeds should be trivial. Right clicking to download any asset should just work.

And so, so much more.

The browser is my agent, not your mole.

xnx•about 1 hour ago

This should be Firefox, but they've expended a lot of time and energy reimplementing code from Chromium instead of focusing on where they can add unique value.

tbeseda•about 1 hour ago

Vivaldi (not affiliated) kinda aims to do this. At least they build the blocker in. It uses the Blink engine, too. I don't think this move by Google will adversely affect Vivaldi in the same way it does Chrome.

cute_boi•about 1 hour ago

they aren't open source...

drnick1•about 1 hour ago

One can hope that Ladybird will become that browser.

xerox13ster•about 1 hour ago

Also, not affiliated with Vivaldi. Just been loyally using them since the alpha bc they posted here about being The Real Opera’s Phoenix, aka its spiritual successor made by a band of Opera employees that Jerry McGuire’d. I watched the movie for the first time because of this browser.

They do built in Adblock that keeps up in the YT arms race. If they’re losing and I get an ad I restart the browser and we’re winning again.

It does lack elemental control of the DOM to manipulate pages on the user chrome, but dev tools is there. Though there are some CSS rendering options in a drop down like inverted colors and sepia and such. You can screenshot any page section with its screenshot tool.

Video controls can be shown on any image/video element with a right click.

Incredibly configurable. It offers email, RSS feeds, profiles. Exposed and granular user privacy controls in the settings window.

Its open image in new tab is pretty consistent, though some sites pull all the tricks and it’s just impossible to get the image (looking at you Reddit)

Their business model is a cookie swap on purchases made through their built in speed dial options. That doesn’t happen if you don’t click on them directly.

They could honestly stand to be fully transparent about that in the browser UI in the wake of Honey. I for one would love a popup that says “using this link sets us as the affiliate for this purchase. Thank you for supporting the development of your Vivaldi browser”

meatmanek•25 minutes ago

> speed dial options. That doesn’t happen if you don’t click on them directly.

It also seems to happen if you type the domain name in the address bar but hit enter when the suggested URL autofills. For me, typing out aliexpress.com fully will send me directly to AE, but typing aliexpress.c and hitting enter (with the autofill completing "om") redirects through vivaldi.com/bk/aliexpresscom-us

gsanderson•about 1 hour ago

Helium has been the closest I've found. It comes with uBlock Origin. It is based on Chromium though, so not sure if the manifest v2 removal will break that.

palmotea•about 1 hour ago

> The browser is my agent, not your mole.

Sorry, Google says no, and who are you to disagree?

Sarcasm aside: this what people who wax poetic about the market miss. In the 21st century, where products have "minds" of their own (software), they are developed to serve their manufactures first. The consumer is a distant second. And competition won't align the market with consumers, because all manufacturers have similar incentives (aka "enshittification").

ramijames•about 2 hours ago

Use Firefox. It's an excellent browser and needs your support.

whywhywhywhy•about 1 hour ago

If you look at the spending of the Mozilla Foundation they most certainly do not need our support they need to spend their resources on their browser instead of frivolities.

nine_k•39 minutes ago

The support here is mindshare and evangelism, not monetary donations.

esskay•about 1 hour ago

Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering), and you dont have to take my word for it, a web search for something like 'firefox sluggish compared to chrome' will back this up too as I've tried switching multiple times but always end up back on a chromium variant because the firefox ui just doesn't feel like an upgrade.

Personally I've just given up trying with firefox and I now put up with brave - its certainly not perfect but at least the ad blocker isnt about to break.

aleksandrm•about 1 hour ago

Not in my experience. Never had issues with FF feeling sluggish at all.

dawnerd•about 1 hour ago

Only place I feel it slow is on Google Meet and clickup.

skeledrew•about 1 hour ago

> a tiny bit slower

And that automatically disqualifies it? I find that wild. I've been using Firefox since it was at v2 I think, and never once considered switching for some speed gain. I actually use Vivaldi on the side sometimes for sites that aren't very Firefox-with-my-extensions-friendly, and find no difference in performance.

drnick1•13 minutes ago

> a tiny bit slower

This is no longer the case, at least not uniformly. My Speedometer 3.1 results are:

- Chromium: 30.0 (± 1.2)

- Firefox: 32.1 (± 1.6)

Using the latest browser version on Arch Linux.

neogodless•42 minutes ago

Let me know how fast the internet without working ad block feels...

(Personally I find Firefox is plenty fast! And the benefits vastly outweigh trying to deal with a Google-powered web browser.)

esskay•28 minutes ago

I dont need to, as I said I'm on brave, which isnt losing its adblocker.

ramijames•about 1 hour ago

Not using adware seems like a big upgrade to me.

palmotea•about 1 hour ago

> Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering)

IIRC, it's got a much smaller memory footprint.

kgwxd•about 1 hour ago

tiny bit slower, all things being equal, maybe. For one, who cares? No one can see tenth of a millisecond speed difference. Second, without a proper ad blocker, rendering speed is meaningless, because all the power will be used to render garbage you never wanted to see in the first place.

tbeseda•about 1 hour ago

Firefox might need my support, but Mozilla does not.

toomuchtodo•about 1 hour ago

The UX aesthetically could use more polish, but agree it is an excellent browser replacement for Chrome.

siren2026•about 1 hour ago

Google revealing how evil they really are.

That was always the plan with Chrome. Put B$ of engineering efforts into creating a nice browser and pushing people to switch over.

Once everyone is addicted and forgot about the competition, start to quietly make it more and more of a Spyware.

Chrome has always and will always be an attempt at controlling the client side of the funnel to be in charge of how much ads they can deliver to your brain. It's 100% a spyware with a side-effect of a browser.

Switch today. Firefox works well.

advisedwang•27 minutes ago

> That was always the plan with Chrome

No. The original plan for Chrome was to save money on "traffic acquisition cost" (The cash they give to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine) by moving users away those company's browsers.

Buuuuut, once Chrome turned out to dominate the browser market, the temptation to abuse that dominance was too much.

whitepoplar•about 2 hours ago

A lot of people have been very vocal about this. I use uBlock Origin Lite and haven't noticed a difference between it and uBlock Origin. Am I missing something?

GeekyBear•about 1 hour ago

> For uBlock Origin users on Chrome, there’s uBlock Origin Lite. However, the Lite version “allows some tracking, its blocklist is a fraction of what the original blocked, and it can't perform the dynamic filtering that made the original effective,”

https://www.pcmag.com/news/googles-next-chrome-update-will-f...

bastawhiz•20 minutes ago

I guess that's what the GP and I are both saying we didn't feel. I have no idea what benefit "dynamic filtering" provides. It sounds good on paper but having tried both versions, I can't tell the experiences apart. I don't see ads, pages load fast, and that seems like enough?

Actually, I'll take that back. I used to see far more stuff get blocked (e.g., when clicking links) than with Lite. Which is to say, Lite feels like it has fewer false positives.

Legend2440•about 1 hour ago

Same. I'm still not seeing ads.

I've realized over time that people on the internet love finding things to be mad about, because raging against evil is fun. They'll make up an injustice if they can't find one today.

Forgeties79•about 1 hour ago

They’re not “making up an injustice.” Google is actively trying to stop ad blocking, this is a fact. You can argue whether or not it’s as severe as some people make it sound or whether people should be upset at all (I think we should be), but let’s not act like this was made up whole cloth.

flohofwoe•about 1 hour ago

+1, Lite is mostly fine. The main difference seems to be that YouTube videos sometimes start a couple seconds late. Not quite annoying enough yet to switch browsers (tbh though, Firefox is totally fine these days, main downside for me is that the WebGPU implementation lags quite a bit behind Chrome and Safari).

skeeter2020•about 1 hour ago

it's not nearly as complete: You only get filter list updates when the extension updates, there's no custom element picker, no per-site switches, no strict-site blocking, no dynamic filtering and you can't import block lists. It's better than nothing (which is pretty much unbearable IME) but not as good.

rjh29•about 1 hour ago

There is a custom element picker.

OsrsNeedsf2P•about 1 hour ago

Origin Lite _can_ be beat by advertisers rotating the URLs they serve ads from. That doesn't mean advertisers are actively bypassing Lite, but they could

charcircuit•3 minutes ago

This can be mitigated by implementing real time updates of filter lists.

lemagedurage•about 1 hour ago

Yes, and this might take some years to catch on.

OTOH it's not out of the question that some open source non-extension Chrome mod emerges that will then block those kinds of ads. Brave is already shipping this anyway.

kgwxd•about 1 hour ago

Hiding elements on the page should be the last goal. A lot of the traffic uBO-proper blocks, has nothing to do with what you see. "Ad blocker" is a lame name, it's not even the important part.

colechristensen•about 1 hour ago

Yup, unless you're really intense about blocking ads, uBlock Origin Lite is at worst a minor loss in quality most people wouldn't notice.

"Closing the door" on ad blockers is quite an exaggeration.

catlikesshrimp•about 1 hour ago

This is HN. The topic has been discussed so many times already. Please read the developer's post about it.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

qnleigh•about 1 hour ago

Naive question: will it not be possible for ad blockers to upgrade to ManifestV3? Is there something about it that makes ad blocking much harder. What does Manifest actually do?

AntonyGarand•about 1 hour ago

There is ublock origin lite[0] on chromium which is the v3 compliant ad blocking strategy, but it is severely limited by the new ruleset and limitations, being a crippled version.

There are more details available on this fan site of ublock[1]:

> What Was Manifest V3?

> Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking.

> How This Affected uBlock Origin

> uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025.

[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

[1]: https://ublockorigin.com/

LiamPowell•about 1 hour ago

Most ad blockers do already use MV3, uBlock Origin is the only one still using V2 as far as I know.

There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...

63stack•30 minutes ago

If this is clickbait, you are a google shill. The limitations of v3 are very clearly explained on the ublock homepage:

uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective.

    Cannot use all filter lists simultaneously (rule limits apply)
    No cosmetic filtering in the default mode
    No scriptlet injection by default
    Limited dynamic filtering capabilities
    Requires broader host permissions upfront

debo_•23 minutes ago

I wonder what degoogled chromium will do. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to drop MV2 support given all the other stuff they're doing, but it would be nice if I could continue to use full uBlock with it.

imzadi•25 minutes ago

I've been using Orion with Kagi for search. Every once in a while I hit a site that won't work on Orion (looking at you Cafe Zupas), but then I jump over to firefox.

neves•about 2 hours ago

Will Brave, which is based in Chromium, still block ads? Since they are changing Chromium, I don't think so.

Cider9986•about 2 hours ago

Pretty sure Brave shields isn't based on an extension API so it shouldn't be affected.

Have people actually noticed worse performance from uBlock Origin lite?

This article isn't nuanced enough. Ad blockers will continue to work.

everdrive•about 2 hours ago

I'm still confused about what makes uBlock Origin Lite less powerful than uBlock Origin. I don't use it or Chrome in any case, but I would prefer to understand the difference.

mirashii•about 1 hour ago

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

wirybeige•about 2 hours ago

I have noticed it to be slightly worse, mostly on "bad" sites. Just using Brave at this point though.

charcircuit•about 2 hours ago

I mostly use ublock origin light on my work laptop for YouTube and I've never seen an ad.

rpdillon•about 1 hour ago

I mentioned this above, but Brave both includes its own ad blocking engine and has also added support for the MV2 version of UBo to the core engine.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

kgwxd•about 1 hour ago

The ones Brave choose to block, sure. You're going to end up with the same problem eventually.

Izmaki•about 1 hour ago

In my experience they're sometimes a little too aggressive and I have to disable the "shields" for the page to function correctly. I have never seen an add while using Brave and that's after 1.5 million trackers blocked and 50 gb bandwidth "saved".

The only browser I would switch to away from Brave is one that, as was described by another user in here, sandboxes all pages/domains and ensures that no data leaks outside unless you are actively allowing it. Think Qubes OS but for browsers. I imagine a nice "drag this domain-box into the Facebook domain blob of a tree structure to allow linking and sharing of data" would be a cool feature. That would make it easy to select and confirm which FAANG company gets your data on which domain.

testfrequency•about 1 hour ago

This will be great for all Enterprise customers.

Employees at companies using corporate computers love a good malicious popup, right?

warpfactor•about 1 hour ago

Firefox is great, and the community "zen" fork is even nicer.

Izmaki•about 1 hour ago

I've wanted to love Zen for a while, I really have, but every time I start using it, it just feels... I don't know... foreign? Too new for comfort?

I think it's one of those "once you get used to it, you never go back" technologies, but I also think it takes a bit of time to get used to it. Thoughts?

petesergeant•about 1 hour ago

Maybe you could expand inline in your comment about what makes Zen “even nicer”

vohk•20 minutes ago

Not the OP, but I appreciated its attempts to declutter and rethink the layout. It encourages a full screen, minimalist style, and jumping between workspaces for different task sets. Hovering and slide out menus rather than permanent bars (although those are still an option). It also brought in some features like Split View before they hit mainline Firefox releases.

Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...

markstos•about 1 hour ago

"This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers... Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit."

This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.

rjh29•about 1 hour ago

This is a non-story, insofar as the V3 shutdown has been in the works for years and has been rolled out since a year ago at least. I stopped being able to use them about six months ago.

dainank•about 1 hour ago

The Ladybird browser could potentially be a nice alternative in the future: https://ladybird.org/

Danox•about 1 hour ago

No surprise Google is being Google and Chrome is great bloated spyware closing out those ad blockers is part of the game.

kyrra•about 1 hour ago

Googler, opinions are my own.

My understanding is they're doing this in the name of security, though it obviously has some benefit to ads. this policy more closely aligns with what Safari does today. And it prevents add-ons from scraping information since they have to put in the block list ahead of time.

I've been using manifest v3 version of Adblock and it's worked just fine for me. But obviously is not perfect, but it fell into more towards security and privacy of the user against malicious extensions.

siren2026•1 minute ago

Aaah the beautiful inability to see what is so obvious because your salary depends on it.

OkayPhysicist•6 minutes ago

Blink 3 times if you're being held against your will, dude. "Trillion dollar advertising company neuters ad blocking because it wants to protect you" is some "I love Big Brother" stuff.

9dev•about 1 hour ago

I primarily use Safari, and only switch to Chrome if a site misbehaves; every time I do so, I'm aghast by the ads and popups I suddenly get everywhere - despite having uBlock installed. I refuse to take that as an acceptable state of browsing the internet.

dfabulich•39 minutes ago

Safari has never supported MV2 uBlock Origin. Chrome with uBlock Lite is exactly the same as Safari with uBlock Lite.

9dev•30 minutes ago

In Safari, I use AdGuard and Consent-O-Matic, which catches pretty much everything.

summarybot•about 1 hour ago

Eh, Google controls the add-ons marketplace though. They control what add-ons are allowed, and they could even audit the add-ons for malicious code/behavior. Google, being a company that collects 75% of its revenue from ads, is being disingenuous by claiming this is a security-centered position. If security were the priority then the add-ons themselves should be inspected thoroughly, that much is obvious.

animitronix•25 minutes ago

And I will be closing the door on Chrome

warpfactor•about 1 hour ago

Firefox.

xienze•about 2 hours ago

It's obviously not perfect but DNS-level ad blockers like Pihole or Adguard Home still make a dramatic difference, so all is not lost.

muvlon•about 2 hours ago

If Google ever decides to "close the door" on these too, all they need to do is make Chrome always use DoH instead of classic DNS.

drnick1•27 minutes ago

Do you mean that that Chrome would force users to use 8.8.8.8 as DNS provider? I don't think this would be acceptable or accepted.

lemagedurage•about 1 hour ago

I don't think this would fly between enterprise usage of custom DNS, captive portals, privacy protection etc

kgwxd•about 1 hour ago

Leaving Chrome is 1000x easier than maintaining that.

charcircuit•about 2 hours ago

This is not true. There are other APIs extensions can use to block ads and browsers like Brave have ad blocking built into the engine itself.

insanitybit•about 2 hours ago

tl;dr MV2 is going away (after already being deprecated a while ago). MV3 exists, you're probably already using it in your adblocker.

ChrisArchitect•about 2 hours ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970

GeekyBear•about 2 hours ago

"Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension" really doesn't tell a general audience what is happening here. No wonder it gained little notice.

bcye•about 2 hours ago

Neither does MV3 close the door on ad blockers. This title seems like gigantic clickbait.

dang•25 minutes ago

There have been quite a few threads about it recently - unfortunately I don't have time to dig up links at the moment.

(also, 450+ comments is not little notice!)

ChrisArchitect•10 minutes ago

Previous link is referenced in this submission as a source, and was updated with the same info that was included in this submission. Same discussion.

neves•about 2 hours ago

The current title is a lot better.

rafram•about 2 hours ago

You mean the title of this post? It's much worse, in my opinion - plenty of strong ad blockers run on MV3. Even the developer of uBlock Origin (Lite) seems to have conceded that the MV3 approach is less resource intensive and didn't require sacrificing any of the features that 99.9% of users use.

zb3•about 1 hour ago

Stop suggesting this Firefox crap which is not only much slower but it also can't even properly manage RAM usage on mobile, leading to app being killed on my low-RAM device, chrome can deal with it even though that's a "desktop" version with extensions for a much newer high end device.

Restricting webRequestBlocking (but it's not going away, just needs a policy extension) and synchronous executeScript did in practice make adblockers unreliable though.. I partially worked it around by using a custom extension that uses the recent userScripts API..

BTW, it's not possible to inject scripts to workers like a ServiceWorker or to replace it's content (DNR let's you redirect but this redirect breaks SW origin + it's visible when you disallow redirects), but MV2 was no better, chrome extensions never had advanced capabilities for ad blocking, a bug about not being able to access POST data via webRequest was open for 10+ years and will probably never be fixed.

But still, firefox is not the alternative, even WebKit is much better.