opera-gx VS uBlock

Give Firefox a try and see how you like it, you can pretty much make it look like Opera GX anyways thru CSS editing/themes, extensions and tweaks.

I don't know if you already know about this, but if you liked Opera GX's visuals and are using firefox now, then you might want to check out this Opera-GX Theme for Firefox Css

Firefox for me it's the best when it comes to customization be it UI wise with CSS tweaks/Themes (Lepton, Wavefox, Firefox GX, etc) or UX wise with about:config modifications (shoutout to Betterfox), that no other Chromium browser can give currently. It's awesome and the reason I've been using it for so many years.

[Firefox-GX]

hi, in "Extras" features you have some styles to use with different addons for vertical tabs, if you want just "tabs hidden" you could choose the ogx_tree-tabs.css of whatever of that sections and do the steps to apply (copy and paste that file in chrome/components folder)

I assume this is it? Thanks for this I will install it

in the "Extras"->"tab-shapes" folder are the css file and the user.js, maybe are you seeing the default user.js and not this new one that you need to use.

Opera-GX Theme for Firefox Css

This theme

- Default UI has too much padding and compact looks broken on High Res Monitors (they also dropped support just by checking statistics, huh), easily solvable by using custom themes.(Lepton, Wavefox, GX theme, etc). Still Photon was nice.

Check out uBlock Origin's per site switches [1]

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.

I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Or if on mobile, it is well worth it to look up adblock options for the browser you use.

What are the compelling advantages of Chrome nowadays?

Chrome is working to limit the capabilities of ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

Whereas a compelling advantage of Firefox is that uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Advertising networks have often been vectors for malware. Using an ad blocker is an important security measure. Even the FBI recommends ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624

> It allows for 30,000 dynamic rules

That is not what we mean by dynamic filters. From https://developer.chrome.com/blog/improvements-to-content-fi...

> However, to support more frequent updates and user-defined rules, extensions can add rules dynamically too, without their developers having to upload a new version of the extension to the Chrome Web Store.

What Chrome is talking about is the ability to specify rules at runtime. What critics of Manifest V3 are talking about is not the ability to dynamically add rules (although that can be an issue), it is the ability to add dynamic rules -- ie rules that analyze and rewrite requests in the style of the blockingWebRequest permission.

It's a little deceptive to claim that the concerns here are outdated and to point to vague terminology that sounds like it's correcting the problem, but on actual inspection turns out to be entirely separate functionality from what the GP was talking about.

> Giving this ability to extensions can slow down the browser for the user. These ads can still be blocked through other means.

This is the debate; most of the adblocking community disagrees with this assertion. uBO maintains a list of some common features that are already not possible to support in Chrome ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... ) and has written about features that are not able to be supported via Chrome's current V3 API ( https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... ). Of particular note are filtering for large media elements (I use this a lot on mobile Firefox, it's great for reducing page size), and top-level filtering of domains/fonts.

> "Its happened before"

> That's not an argument

It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.

> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt

That would be agreeing with the article, unless I understand what you mean.

> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.

In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.

> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?

The points made in the article are:

* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company

* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards

* It’s fast and has a nice user interface

Onto which I'd add:

* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so when Manifest V3 rolls out

* Allows more customization of interface and home page

* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect search revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)

Firefox has the best adblocking capability with ublock origin, which explicitly operates better on Firefox. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox

If you have no knowledge you can still make use of element picker in the context menu. In this case though the problematic element will have a generated class name like `frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-`, so I resorted to the CSS syntax (`##`). There are a lot, a freaking lot of them [1] but the CSS syntax alone can achieve a lot.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax

Paste into uBO Dashboard -> My filters tab and apply changes.