This is ultimately the endpoint of all Chromium-based browsers. Even the most stalwart will throw in the towel on MV2 support sooner or later, because the effort required to maintain non-trivial patches against mainline becomes too great for the team to keep up with.
It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.
This has been obvious to everyone who knows that the key feature to the devs of these browsers is “-based.” None of the chromium-based browsers are anything other than UI tweaks and certain extensions being included by default. None of them rewrite significant parts of the browser engine, because that would be too much extra work.
The only projects which have a hope of maintaining MV2 compatibility are those who are a hard fork of an earlier version of chromium or a totally different engine.
To my point: The article mentions that Opera still says they will maintain MV2 for as long as it is “technically reasonable.” Mark my works, Google will find a way to break Opera’s MV2 patches that makes it too hard to maintain.
Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.
I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.
I worked on multiple projects modifying Chromium and V8 a decade ago, and the GP matches my experience exactly. Absolute mountains of dev time just tracking the latest release and what we wanted to do wasn’t limited to one module or subsystem.
> open source nature is something of a technicality
No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.
That's kinda true with every open source software. As soon as some branch has a sizable chunk of developers, forks are discouraged, because either you need to keep up or give up eventually. That's what makes torvalds/linux special and why people want to upstream. If the upstream doesn't accept: oh well.
> Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google
The main thing that is affecting adblockers with this MV2/MV3 change is the ability to dynamically block requests themselves rather than have to give a pre-computed list of patterns to the browser.
We're talking about hooking into right before http requests go out and make them fail here. Let's not pretend that maintaining this capability is out of reach for any serious fork if they actually cared. Let's also not pretend it's more than a few hours per month of dev time per month to maintain it (and most months it will be 0 hours).
And before you ask: Yes, I have worked extensively with chromium's codebase when I worked for a kiosk company.
Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the ad blocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the built-in ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.
Fortunately all you need is one clanker to maintain the patches. What used to be immensely expensive human work (and tedious!), is now just ”claude please re-enable manifest v2 and rebuild an installer”
Google is an ad company, ad blockers are bad. Why are you using a browser from an advertising company and expecting different results?
Microsoft repurposed Google's adware in Chrome into Edge telemetry/spyware to feed your browsing directly into windows telemetry to watch everything you do, they wanted that back when IE lost the war.
Google already went evil and set the precedent removing adblocking capabilities, now Microsoft can just blame them and feed everything you do into Bing for ad money as well as telemetry/spyware without you blocking it, that's effectively double-dipping all in on stupid windows users.
I use Chrome. uBlock Origin Lite works fine, basically as well as the old uBlock as far as I can tell. As to why, I kind of like it - the built in Google Lens tool is cool and I don't think is in the other browsers?
This is why we all need to rally around Firefox (or Librewolf, or Waterfox, or whatever fork you prefer) and make sure that sacred goose is never tampered with.
That goose was already roasted. Firefox can't be trusted with Mozilla because Mozilla can't be trusted with Firefox. They intervened in the most important antitrust trial so far this millennium on Google's side (to support paying off their direct competitors), contributing to actual harm to society.
Somebody who has already made their money needs to fork the thing and put it into an actual public service nonprofit, rather than another creepy branch of the nonprofit-military-industrial complex. Not somebody whose CEO came from Voice of America, WeWork, Wikipedia, Northrop-Grumman, the NSA or some bank, talking about how much they need to innovate and create strategic partnerships. Instead, get somebody who wants to make and maintain a safe, minimal, light, modular browser that works exclusively for its user, and whose components can be easily be included in other projects.
Sent to MS is one thing - OneDrive/sync/etc. Used by MS and processed for nefarious purposes is another. Does it say that it 'may' be used for telemetry purposes?
The telemetry and ads (on start page) didn't bother you? I'm surprised there's seemingly a contingent of people who are too lazy to install any other chrome fork (eg. Brave), but are motivated enough to up sticks and switch to firefox the moment ublock is removed.
It always feels weird to see so much more complaining about Firefox than Chrome and Edge, while it's still so very much far ahead in terms of respecting user choices. All AI features can easily be turned off (and I am assuming those respect user privacy better than the ones of Chrome/Edge). When you say no to Firefox, it remembers it. Chrome keeps asking me every few days / weeks to become the default browser.
If we lose Firefox the web is going to be a worse place to be in.
I feel a lot of the "complaints" about Firefox are misinformed opinions from a decade ago or more. I hear falsehoods such as "it's slower" or "it takes up more RAM" which are both patently false in modern times. That was all fixed up years ago.
There is no “browser business,” because people are - with rare exceptions - unwilling to pay for a web browser. Even Firefox is ad-supported indirectly via its default search contract with google.
Chromium being open source is not a mistake. Letting google be the sole driver and not forking it has been. People who want control over their browsers have options. It's a fight because most people don't care about these things.
Right. For example, Firefox Mobile doesn't support hitting ctrl+T to open a new tab, completely breaking flow for anyone on a tablet with a keyboard or their phone docked to a monitor.
One can simply fire up a claude and tell it what you'd like to change. A few minutes to sign the extension and Firefox does exactly what you'd like it to. I relayy just do not understand why HN comments pretend this option doesn't exist, or that this is so hard. I have extensions linking it with my i3 setup, setting custom CSS on wm actions, custom shortcuts, what have you. It takes maybe an hour of work to do it nicely.
I honestly don't know how people do without ad blockers. Even with being ok with ads, they are so overwhelming that I could not use internet without blocking them
I use noscript instead of an ad blocker. I find it blocks the intrusive ads. I do not mind what I view as normal ads (ie: text or link), but these video and popup ads drive me crazy. I find noscript blocks the "bad" ads.
In case your assumption here is that TFA is about Edge disabling adblockers: it's not. It's just removing ManifestV2 support. ManifestV3 is still supported. Despite what one might assume, MV3 does not seem to measurably diminish the effectiveness of adblockers; if anything, it improves it. (Source: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0027.php)
The only reason anyone knows about the switch between manifest 2 and 3 is that the only meaningful difference is the crippled ad blocking ability. Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
I've found ad-blockers other than uBlock Origin MV2 to struggle with particularly aggressive anti-adblocking scripts.
I don't particularly notice, but my wife was getting frustrated last night when she was looking for recipes, an ad network was blocked at the DNS level, and despite local ad-blockers, every recipe site she was visiting was redirecting her to a "please disable your ad blocker" page.
Chromium is a solid browser, Firefox is second atleast in every aspect, but their companies "politics" is what make the difference, it's hard to swallow pill but Chromium is popular for a reason
What is better about it? I switched back to FireFox several years ago (with a very brief stint on Arc in there) after using Chrome for years and I couldn't describe a single hit I took in QOL. I remember, at the time at least, that FF's dev tooling had more useful things, at least for me (I couldn't tell you what those were at this point... I think I remember nicer flex/grid inspecting tools). From what I can tell, Chromium is popular because so many apps don't test on anything else, but I don't use a lot of web apps so I guess I probably don't run into this as much.
> it's hard to swallow pill but Chromium is popular for a reason
yes, google pushing hard "download real browser" for years on their main page didn't have anything to do with it… oh the benevolent monopolies doing what's best in user interest! /s
DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.
I'd rather have 100% of devices on my network have near 90% of all ads effectively ad blocked than deal with installing ad blockers on all possible clients. Sure, I use an ad blocker on my personal machine with firefox, but none of the phones besides mine does. None of the family that visits do. Barely any of my friends that come over do. None of the TVs and streaming devices and whatnot do. I am blocking more ads from ever reaching my network than the majority of people who only use browser based adblockers do.
I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.
Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.
Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.
Title has a weird spin. I'd say that "stronger" is more accurate than "older". Ironically, MV2 blockers can do dynamic updates and so are often "newer" in the relevant sense.
I do wonder if we haven't seen the effects of an MV3-only web yet. As in, once the vast majority of browsers lose MV2 support, will ad networks evolve to get around the limited MV3 capabilities? uBlock Origin Lite might be good enough for you now, but how about in a year or three?
Welp, once this happens I’ll just migrate over to Firefox. I tried for one day to browse the internet without an ad blocker and I just couldn’t, it was awful.
I'd been using it solely for GMail / Google Drive / etc. at work, for whatever improved compatibility a Chromium browser might provide over Firefox, which I use for everything else. I got the warning that UBlock Origin won't work, and I immediately ditched Vivaldi. I'm sad about it, I think Vivaldi otherwise is a good browser.
Vivaldi has ad blocking built into it, and has no issue with you enabling developer settings and sideloading extensions from a file you download from Github Releases.
something I've really been wondering about is is mv2 really a serious security loophole? if I think about it, browser extensions really do have a scary amount of access to sensitive webpages, so google's rationale for restricting the attack surface is at least plausible. and as the maintainers of the overwhelmingly dominant browser, they can't build ad blocking into the core engine, not because google is an ad company, but simply because that level of putting their thumb on the scales would lead to a huge backlash.
I wonder if this is from efforts to maintain the difference between upstream and Edge - such that Edge is trying to simplify development by following Chrome/Chromium closer.
I use MV3 AdGuard and it blocks ads for me. I don't get the fuss about MV2 deprecation.. sure, MV3 is limited compared to firefox, but it's not like MV2 was that much better, no version ever supported rewriting request response.
MV3 DNR redirect is notably lame though, instead of replacing the response it generates a real redirect which breaks for example replacing the service worker response. But could MV2 webRequestBlocking replace the response? Well of course not.
Rules are limited (in syntax and number) and you can only ship updated rules with updated extensions (at least you can skip the queue if you only update rulesets but it's VERY annoying to do). It's also missing a bunch of features: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... (I see here that replacing response body is possible with Firefox only, is that your use-case?). MV2 was miles better.
Besides AdGuard I also have my own extension that loads userscripts from my own server (that uses the new userScripts API), so I think I only see my own point of view and the things that would potentially limit my solutions.
So far I'm able to block everything I want, but I mentioned replacing the response body because this is the only way I could modify or even inspect the service worker.. I think this vector could help circumventing ad blockers, but again - it would only matter if there were ads I'd not be able to block.
When it comes to distribution, firefox sucks because I can't even run my own extensions there, my distro doesn't package firefox developer edition so signatures are required. In contrast, Chrome let's me load unpacked extensions without any problems.
Just observe this thread. It's a tribal moment, an occasion for a consumer to reassure himself that he has the right philosophy, uses the right product and rightly hates these other things that deserve to be hated. The fellow believers can upvote each other and downvote any empirical observation which threatens the faith.
For what it's worth, I daily drive Edge on my Windows machine and it's an okay browser, haven't had a reason to install Chrome in ages (though did run Firefox for a while due to liking their dev tools better, it's still on my MacBook cause I like the UI more than Safari).
Even when my Intel Arc B580 has its drivers freeze the browser, I can just kill the GPU rendering process and it picks back up with no data loss, whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing. Seems related to video decode, changing ANGLE backends or whatever in the browsers didn't really help and disabling hardware acceleration makes the experience suck more than it otherwise should.
If not for that, I'd still probably be on Firefox fully, despite Mozilla not exactly being the most sane of companies, though maybe trying to fund developing a browser and a whole org is a bit crazy as it is.
Brave was okay but nothing special. Maybe I should look at Vivaldi again, but it's an odd position to be in, when upstream is pushing changes on you, so it probably doesn't matter what they do or don't want to support long term, same as with every other Chromium derived browser.
Bummer about Chromium fucking over people who dislike ads.
Please don't bite me -- question for this group, where "Firefox" is going back and forth as a topic.
Isn't Brave okay?
There's something toxic about Brave I'm not getting; I can tell you it's incredibly effective as a tool to block ads, scripts, and tracking. What am I missing? It's tracking me? The project owners are mean? There's something nefarious in the codebase? I have firefox and Brave, and both are 'OK', and better than Chrome or Edge which I only use for work. In the past I was told after being downvoted for mentioning Brave that the founder is controversial. Is that it?
Brave said they’ll keep some select MV2 extensions, though that remains to be seen. Especially if it causes too much maintenance headache with upstream chromium. Also it seems that Brave now distributes these select MV2 extensions. So I’m not sure if they have forked them, or if they just repackage upstream.
Not saying this is it, but I never managed to block YouTube shorts with brave adblocker (in mobile), where I can do it with ublock. If you can do it, please explain, I promise I will try asap (I really dislike ff mobile UI).
On mobile (similar on Desktop), just go to Setting -> Shields and Privacy -> Content Filters.
In there are a bunch of Youtube related blockers (including Shorts), that I find work really well. Mobile Brave also lets you lock/screen off your phone while a YT video continues playing, which is a killer feature for listening to podcasts.
I found myself becoming addicted to YT Shorts, and Brave's filters totally solved my problem.
They have control over what they distribute. Chromium and Firefox are both open source and people can (and should) use derivatives they find acceptable.
Sure, just change the source and build from source.
The reason is that V2 opened the door to some fairly nasty attacks. "This extension can read everything you enter on any form". There were some extensions that did exactly what you're thinking of.
I suspect that nobody will make a browser that lets a plugin do that any more. It's easy, but on closer reflection, would you do it?
People can create the world, but they do need a lot of time. A lot of money buys you time, so nobody 'poor' can keep up. That wouldn't be a problem for web UAs, if the standards wouldn't be 'improved' at the same path as well. It's kinda like proof of work, but for standard bodies and ownership of a system.
This is ultimately the endpoint of all Chromium-based browsers. Even the most stalwart will throw in the towel on MV2 support sooner or later, because the effort required to maintain non-trivial patches against mainline becomes too great for the team to keep up with.
It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.
This has been obvious to everyone who knows that the key feature to the devs of these browsers is “-based.” None of the chromium-based browsers are anything other than UI tweaks and certain extensions being included by default. None of them rewrite significant parts of the browser engine, because that would be too much extra work.
The only projects which have a hope of maintaining MV2 compatibility are those who are a hard fork of an earlier version of chromium or a totally different engine.
To my point: The article mentions that Opera still says they will maintain MV2 for as long as it is “technically reasonable.” Mark my works, Google will find a way to break Opera’s MV2 patches that makes it too hard to maintain.
I keep telling that folks shipping Chrome forks and Electron junk have helped Google turn the Web into ChromeOS Platform.
And then they complain about Safari.
Had it been today, and Google would have no issue pushing for PNaCL.
I don't think this is the case.
Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.
I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.
Maybe things have stabilized a bit?
I worked on multiple projects modifying Chromium and V8 a decade ago, and the GP matches my experience exactly. Absolute mountains of dev time just tracking the latest release and what we wanted to do wasn’t limited to one module or subsystem.
> open source nature is something of a technicality
No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.
That's kinda true with every open source software. As soon as some branch has a sizable chunk of developers, forks are discouraged, because either you need to keep up or give up eventually. That's what makes torvalds/linux special and why people want to upstream. If the upstream doesn't accept: oh well.
> Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google
The main thing that is affecting adblockers with this MV2/MV3 change is the ability to dynamically block requests themselves rather than have to give a pre-computed list of patterns to the browser.
We're talking about hooking into right before http requests go out and make them fail here. Let's not pretend that maintaining this capability is out of reach for any serious fork if they actually cared. Let's also not pretend it's more than a few hours per month of dev time per month to maintain it (and most months it will be 0 hours).
And before you ask: Yes, I have worked extensively with chromium's codebase when I worked for a kiosk company.
Brave's built in adblocker is on par to uBlock Origin for me.
Does it have the same configurability though? Custom lists and the like? I really need those.
I'd use Brave if someone made a fork with all the BAT token stuff removed but I haven't seen one.
Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the ad blocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the built-in ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.
Fortunately all you need is one clanker to maintain the patches. What used to be immensely expensive human work (and tedious!), is now just ”claude please re-enable manifest v2 and rebuild an installer”
Google is an ad company, ad blockers are bad. Why are you using a browser from an advertising company and expecting different results?
Microsoft repurposed Google's adware in Chrome into Edge telemetry/spyware to feed your browsing directly into windows telemetry to watch everything you do, they wanted that back when IE lost the war.
Google already went evil and set the precedent removing adblocking capabilities, now Microsoft can just blame them and feed everything you do into Bing for ad money as well as telemetry/spyware without you blocking it, that's effectively double-dipping all in on stupid windows users.
I use Chrome. uBlock Origin Lite works fine, basically as well as the old uBlock as far as I can tell. As to why, I kind of like it - the built in Google Lens tool is cool and I don't think is in the other browsers?
Unfortunately, Chromium is widespread and extremely optimised for any HW it lays its hand on.
Hey now, I use Edge on macOS.
Why?
This is why we all need to rally around Firefox (or Librewolf, or Waterfox, or whatever fork you prefer) and make sure that sacred goose is never tampered with.
That goose was already roasted. Firefox can't be trusted with Mozilla because Mozilla can't be trusted with Firefox. They intervened in the most important antitrust trial so far this millennium on Google's side (to support paying off their direct competitors), contributing to actual harm to society.
Somebody who has already made their money needs to fork the thing and put it into an actual public service nonprofit, rather than another creepy branch of the nonprofit-military-industrial complex. Not somebody whose CEO came from Voice of America, WeWork, Wikipedia, Northrop-Grumman, the NSA or some bank, talking about how much they need to innovate and create strategic partnerships. Instead, get somebody who wants to make and maintain a safe, minimal, light, modular browser that works exclusively for its user, and whose components can be easily be included in other projects.
Ladybird is the future. Firefox is a joke at this point
Ladybird may be the future, but for us non-time-travelers, Firefox is currently the best option.
Why is Firefox a joke?
If this thread is indicative of the sort of browser discourse in <current year> it's no wonder Google won.
Nerds used to know how to computer, is what i'm saying.
This industry doesn't really hire nerds anymore.
HR prefers brogrammers who can fast talk.
[dead]
Welp, the biggest reason that I use Edge just got thrown out, time to switch to Firefox.
Until 2023, Edge was sending every URL you visited to bingapis.com.
Microsoft's current privacy statement also says "Depending on your settings, this browsing history is sent to Microsoft"
That seems to be true to every major application release by MS. No, the OS is of course secure, pinky promise!
> Microsoft's current privacy statement also says "Depending on your settings, this browsing history is sent to Microsoft"
Edge allows to sync history (as Chrome and Firefox also do). Given that functionality, what else do you want them to say in their privacy statement..?
Sent to MS is one thing - OneDrive/sync/etc. Used by MS and processed for nefarious purposes is another. Does it say that it 'may' be used for telemetry purposes?
what browser that respect your privacy ??
The telemetry and ads (on start page) didn't bother you? I'm surprised there's seemingly a contingent of people who are too lazy to install any other chrome fork (eg. Brave), but are motivated enough to up sticks and switch to firefox the moment ublock is removed.
At least that's something I can just rant about a couple of times a year, and enjoy tracker blocking the rest of the time.
Ad blocking is a big deal.
All the software freedom people here will do everything except use Firefox.
I've been using firefox happily for years; I'm still emotionally invested in chrome having proper ad blocking, because that's good for users.
I never stopped using Firefox.
It always feels weird to see so much more complaining about Firefox than Chrome and Edge, while it's still so very much far ahead in terms of respecting user choices. All AI features can easily be turned off (and I am assuming those respect user privacy better than the ones of Chrome/Edge). When you say no to Firefox, it remembers it. Chrome keeps asking me every few days / weeks to become the default browser.
If we lose Firefox the web is going to be a worse place to be in.
I feel a lot of the "complaints" about Firefox are misinformed opinions from a decade ago or more. I hear falsehoods such as "it's slower" or "it takes up more RAM" which are both patently false in modern times. That was all fixed up years ago.
I guess it still will be the best browser to download Firefox
It always was.
> I guess it still will be the best browser to download Firefox
```cmd winget install Mozilla.Firefox ``` Should always work out-of-the-box now.
Good as long as you don't want the EME-free version.
Lets hope it stays that way :)
But if offered enough $, I fear it will join that no-bocker bandwagon.
Advertising companies shouldn’t be in the browser business. It’s a really bad conflict of interest. Chromium is a mistake.
Firefox is pretty great. But IMO they have some poor ux defaults that make it unappealing to random people who simply want a browser.
There is no “browser business,” because people are - with rare exceptions - unwilling to pay for a web browser. Even Firefox is ad-supported indirectly via its default search contract with google.
There is a browser business when the browser company is also in the ad business.
Chromium being open source is not a mistake. Letting google be the sole driver and not forking it has been. People who want control over their browsers have options. It's a fight because most people don't care about these things.
And, Mozilla is more and more becoming an advertising company which is really worrying.
With their anonym acquisition and the "privacy preserving" attribution stuff they now have an active interest in advertising.
Right. For example, Firefox Mobile doesn't support hitting ctrl+T to open a new tab, completely breaking flow for anyone on a tablet with a keyboard or their phone docked to a monitor.
One can simply fire up a claude and tell it what you'd like to change. A few minutes to sign the extension and Firefox does exactly what you'd like it to. I relayy just do not understand why HN comments pretend this option doesn't exist, or that this is so hard. I have extensions linking it with my i3 setup, setting custom CSS on wm actions, custom shortcuts, what have you. It takes maybe an hour of work to do it nicely.
I honestly don't know how people do without ad blockers. Even with being ok with ads, they are so overwhelming that I could not use internet without blocking them
I install Firefox and uBlock on friends/family devices as often as I can.
Most laypeople I know haven't seen an ad blocker in action ever.
I use noscript instead of an ad blocker. I find it blocks the intrusive ads. I do not mind what I view as normal ads (ie: text or link), but these video and popup ads drive me crazy. I find noscript blocks the "bad" ads.
I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.
It's still a security risk though: you still have to visit those sites to determine if they have ads or not. Why browse without proper protection?
>I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.
Excuse me. I take it you don't read any mainstream news (NYT, Bloomberg, WSJ, WSP, etc etc).
So no youtube?
In case your assumption here is that TFA is about Edge disabling adblockers: it's not. It's just removing ManifestV2 support. ManifestV3 is still supported. Despite what one might assume, MV3 does not seem to measurably diminish the effectiveness of adblockers; if anything, it improves it. (Source: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0027.php)
The only reason anyone knows about the switch between manifest 2 and 3 is that the only meaningful difference is the crippled ad blocking ability. Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
I've found ad-blockers other than uBlock Origin MV2 to struggle with particularly aggressive anti-adblocking scripts.
I don't particularly notice, but my wife was getting frustrated last night when she was looking for recipes, an ad network was blocked at the DNS level, and despite local ad-blockers, every recipe site she was visiting was redirecting her to a "please disable your ad blocker" page.
Isn't the main issue that for MV3 you can't have a dynamic blocklist ? And so you have to update it with an extension update ?
<surprised pikachu> time for everyone using Chromium-based crap xD
Chromium is a solid browser, Firefox is second atleast in every aspect, but their companies "politics" is what make the difference, it's hard to swallow pill but Chromium is popular for a reason
What is better about it? I switched back to FireFox several years ago (with a very brief stint on Arc in there) after using Chrome for years and I couldn't describe a single hit I took in QOL. I remember, at the time at least, that FF's dev tooling had more useful things, at least for me (I couldn't tell you what those were at this point... I think I remember nicer flex/grid inspecting tools). From what I can tell, Chromium is popular because so many apps don't test on anything else, but I don't use a lot of web apps so I guess I probably don't run into this as much.
> it's hard to swallow pill but Chromium is popular for a reason
yes, google pushing hard "download real browser" for years on their main page didn't have anything to do with it… oh the benevolent monopolies doing what's best in user interest! /s
Running Unbound on my gateway with a curated adblock list. Easy setup, network-wide ad blocking on every device / browser.
DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.
I'd rather have 100% of devices on my network have near 90% of all ads effectively ad blocked than deal with installing ad blockers on all possible clients. Sure, I use an ad blocker on my personal machine with firefox, but none of the phones besides mine does. None of the family that visits do. Barely any of my friends that come over do. None of the TVs and streaming devices and whatnot do. I am blocking more ads from ever reaching my network than the majority of people who only use browser based adblockers do.
I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.
Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.
Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.
Title has a weird spin. I'd say that "stronger" is more accurate than "older". Ironically, MV2 blockers can do dynamic updates and so are often "newer" in the relevant sense.
I do wonder if we haven't seen the effects of an MV3-only web yet. As in, once the vast majority of browsers lose MV2 support, will ad networks evolve to get around the limited MV3 capabilities? uBlock Origin Lite might be good enough for you now, but how about in a year or three?
Welp, once this happens I’ll just migrate over to Firefox. I tried for one day to browse the internet without an ad blocker and I just couldn’t, it was awful.
These companies that "own the web" shouldn't be allowed to also own the browsers. We went through this already.
uBO 1.7.3 was released just 3 days ago, so it would be more accurate to say "better" rather than "older".
Vivaldi for the win.
Vivaldi is about to drop support for Manifest V2 as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1urieed/com...
I'd been using it solely for GMail / Google Drive / etc. at work, for whatever improved compatibility a Chromium browser might provide over Firefox, which I use for everything else. I got the warning that UBlock Origin won't work, and I immediately ditched Vivaldi. I'm sad about it, I think Vivaldi otherwise is a good browser.
I love Vivaldi, but it also uses Chromium. If an extension is not in the Chrome Web store Vivaldi will not be able to install it.
Firefox seems to be the only reasonably mainstream option for proper ad blocking.
Vivaldi has ad blocking built into it, and has no issue with you enabling developer settings and sideloading extensions from a file you download from Github Releases.
something I've really been wondering about is is mv2 really a serious security loophole? if I think about it, browser extensions really do have a scary amount of access to sensitive webpages, so google's rationale for restricting the attack surface is at least plausible. and as the maintainers of the overwhelmingly dominant browser, they can't build ad blocking into the core engine, not because google is an ad company, but simply because that level of putting their thumb on the scales would lead to a huge backlash.
I wonder if this is from efforts to maintain the difference between upstream and Edge - such that Edge is trying to simplify development by following Chrome/Chromium closer.
I use MV3 AdGuard and it blocks ads for me. I don't get the fuss about MV2 deprecation.. sure, MV3 is limited compared to firefox, but it's not like MV2 was that much better, no version ever supported rewriting request response.
MV3 DNR redirect is notably lame though, instead of replacing the response it generates a real redirect which breaks for example replacing the service worker response. But could MV2 webRequestBlocking replace the response? Well of course not.
Rules are limited (in syntax and number) and you can only ship updated rules with updated extensions (at least you can skip the queue if you only update rulesets but it's VERY annoying to do). It's also missing a bunch of features: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... (I see here that replacing response body is possible with Firefox only, is that your use-case?). MV2 was miles better.
Besides AdGuard I also have my own extension that loads userscripts from my own server (that uses the new userScripts API), so I think I only see my own point of view and the things that would potentially limit my solutions.
So far I'm able to block everything I want, but I mentioned replacing the response body because this is the only way I could modify or even inspect the service worker.. I think this vector could help circumventing ad blockers, but again - it would only matter if there were ads I'd not be able to block.
When it comes to distribution, firefox sucks because I can't even run my own extensions there, my distro doesn't package firefox developer edition so signatures are required. In contrast, Chrome let's me load unpacked extensions without any problems.
> I don't get the fuss about MV2 deprecation
Just observe this thread. It's a tribal moment, an occasion for a consumer to reassure himself that he has the right philosophy, uses the right product and rightly hates these other things that deserve to be hated. The fellow believers can upvote each other and downvote any empirical observation which threatens the faith.
Droped Chromium browsers and been using Safari with Wipr2, so far the best experience
For what it's worth, I daily drive Edge on my Windows machine and it's an okay browser, haven't had a reason to install Chrome in ages (though did run Firefox for a while due to liking their dev tools better, it's still on my MacBook cause I like the UI more than Safari).
Even when my Intel Arc B580 has its drivers freeze the browser, I can just kill the GPU rendering process and it picks back up with no data loss, whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing. Seems related to video decode, changing ANGLE backends or whatever in the browsers didn't really help and disabling hardware acceleration makes the experience suck more than it otherwise should.
If not for that, I'd still probably be on Firefox fully, despite Mozilla not exactly being the most sane of companies, though maybe trying to fund developing a browser and a whole org is a bit crazy as it is.
Brave was okay but nothing special. Maybe I should look at Vivaldi again, but it's an odd position to be in, when upstream is pushing changes on you, so it probably doesn't matter what they do or don't want to support long term, same as with every other Chromium derived browser.
Bummer about Chromium fucking over people who dislike ads.
>I can just kill the GPU rendering process
>and it picks back up with no data loss,
>whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing
about:processes > kill the GPU process without having to restart Firefox.
Thanks!
I will try it out the next time when I jump back to Firefox!
Not sure why it doesn't show up under Task Manager as clearly as Edge's does.
all the forks in the world won't have widevine support
only Firefox is left which is fine by me
No surprise they want to serve ads everywhere…
Please don't bite me -- question for this group, where "Firefox" is going back and forth as a topic.
Isn't Brave okay?
There's something toxic about Brave I'm not getting; I can tell you it's incredibly effective as a tool to block ads, scripts, and tracking. What am I missing? It's tracking me? The project owners are mean? There's something nefarious in the codebase? I have firefox and Brave, and both are 'OK', and better than Chrome or Edge which I only use for work. In the past I was told after being downvoted for mentioning Brave that the founder is controversial. Is that it?
> Isn't Brave okay?
Sure it is. I use both Brave and FF (FF more than Brave, TBH).
Brave's builtin adblocker is pretty great as well.
The founder invented JavaScript, which is a subject that triggers knee-jerk reactions in people who approach problem solving emotionally.
This is not at all what is usually held against him.
Basically every chromium based browser.
Brave as well?
Brave said they’ll keep some select MV2 extensions, though that remains to be seen. Especially if it causes too much maintenance headache with upstream chromium. Also it seems that Brave now distributes these select MV2 extensions. So I’m not sure if they have forked them, or if they just repackage upstream.
Brave's adblock isn't as powerful as ublock.
In what sense? As a normie-tier user of Brave’s internal and blocker, it’s worked great. I never became a power-user of uBlock.
Not saying this is it, but I never managed to block YouTube shorts with brave adblocker (in mobile), where I can do it with ublock. If you can do it, please explain, I promise I will try asap (I really dislike ff mobile UI).
On mobile (similar on Desktop), just go to Setting -> Shields and Privacy -> Content Filters.
In there are a bunch of Youtube related blockers (including Shorts), that I find work really well. Mobile Brave also lets you lock/screen off your phone while a YT video continues playing, which is a killer feature for listening to podcasts.
I found myself becoming addicted to YT Shorts, and Brave's filters totally solved my problem.
You are my hero. Thanks.
+1, works well enough
It doesn't have to be so long as it still supports the above.
I don't need the most powerful, I just need good enough.
I believe their adblock is built in to the browser and not an extension, so it can be more effective than the limited extensions.
Brave has its own downsides too, but at least the browser seems pretty effective at blocking ads and tracking junk.
Why do browser vendors have such a control over browsers? Can anyone make a dll injection and bring back manifest v2 ?
They have control over what they distribute. Chromium and Firefox are both open source and people can (and should) use derivatives they find acceptable.
Sure, just change the source and build from source.
The reason is that V2 opened the door to some fairly nasty attacks. "This extension can read everything you enter on any form". There were some extensions that did exactly what you're thinking of.
I suspect that nobody will make a browser that lets a plugin do that any more. It's easy, but on closer reflection, would you do it?
People can create the world, but they do need a lot of time. A lot of money buys you time, so nobody 'poor' can keep up. That wouldn't be a problem for web UAs, if the standards wouldn't be 'improved' at the same path as well. It's kinda like proof of work, but for standard bodies and ownership of a system.
who uses Edge anyway..
95% of corporate users sadly due to Microsoft's lobbying
It's ending manifest V2, not just adblockers.
uBlock Origin lite is V3 and is still supported
Inferior alternative
The link is paywalled and the site requires me a subscription to keep reading TFA. This happens even after using the link with the Wayback Machine.
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