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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads (www.windowscentral.com)

submitted 4 months ago by mesamunefire@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] mke@lemmy.world 186 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (38 children)

I think some people overestimate how many will migrate to Firefox in the near future over this.

High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.
Just as many Firefox users like Firefox, lots of Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don't want to lose that.
The kind of tech-aware person who'd switch over this is much more likely to have seen the news months ago and taken action already.

As fun as it is to imagine an Adpocalypse shocking the masses and pushing them to try out alternatives to big tech, it's also way too optimistic, I feel.

[–] OriginalUsername7@lemmy.world 40 points 4 months ago (4 children)

The uBlock Origin chrome extension ~~has~~ had 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.

Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.

[–] Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

Depends on their methodology. Sure, a huge proportion of those are users who haven't heard of uBO, but we're forgetting a lot of caveats:

Electron exists and lots of apps are built on top of it and identify as "Chrome". Judging by the numbers most have been weeded out, but some edge cases do visit more sites so they end up in the count.
A lot of workplaces mandate the browser, which is often Chrome. This also gets counted.
A not insignificant amount of Firefox users change their useragent to Chrome.

All of these skew the numbers towards Chrome. Some Chrome users use a different adblocker which lowers the uBO statistic.

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