Vue lecture

Which browsers still support and allow uBlock to work?

uBlock has been my favourite web browser extension for years, removing all ads including video ads in YouTube for example.

Firefox and Safari are essentially your only options if you don't want a chromium based browser. Firefox is the only one of those that supports adblocking at the level uBlock Origin operates.

For Brave, Vivaldi, Opera GX, Edge etc, to continue to support uBO, they would need to maintain a fork of Chromium that supports Manifest v2 and it's likely that Google will continue to merge anti-user privacy stuff into Chromium that makes supporting v2 untenable at some point in the future.

cf. also: Google Chrome not supporting uBlock anymore is the result of Manifest v2 support being deprecated in favor of Manifest v3

Quoting uBlock official documentation:

uBlock works best on Firefox.


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Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android

We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser—silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.
These native Android apps receive browsers' metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users' mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users' visiting sites embedding their scripts.
This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android's permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users’ web activity.


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