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> I wish Chrome and Firefox would adopt a content blocking system similar to Safari, where the author of the ad blocker can essentially tell the browser what content to block, but the ad blocker itself doesn't get any information about user activity.

Please, no. This is exactly what makes Safari all-around worthless, despite all the hard work they put into it.

Chrome will get forked the minute they do this, and the forked version will restore that functionality, and I will immediately install that fork and uninstall Chrome.

>Please, no. This is exactly what makes Safari all-around worthless, despite all the hard work they put into it.

Keep in mind that I said that the legacy extension system should remain in place, for people such as yourself that wish to utilize it.

That said, I wouldn't characterize Safari's content blockers as worthless. It's not as effective as Firefox's ad blockers, but I still rarely see ads. If I had to guess, I'd say under five ads per month manage to sneak through.

In my mind that just means switching over the big boy browser to that approach just means giving an incentive for more of those types of ads that slip through.

> I wish Chrome and Firefox would adopt a content blocking system similar to Safari...

This is exactly what Chrome's Manifest v3 offers. As they put it: "There's a new declarativeNetRequest API which lets extensions modify and block network requests in a privacy-preserving and performant way."[0] MV3 went live earlier this year so you can build on it now, but no word on when extensions will be required to migrate.

Manifest v3 has been widely criticized [1] for weakening ad blocking which of course aligns with Google's self-interest. It's a tough balance to strike.

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/mv3-o...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430

Nope, MV3 weakens ad blocking, but still gives full read access to the requests.

The CWS developer program policy does not allow extensions to request unnecessary permissions. If an extension doesn't have a good reason to observe network requests in MV3, it will/should be rejected.

So yes, it's technically possible to observe network requests but in practice few should be doing it.

I've stopped using extensions altoghether. And I used quite a few back in the day, even made a couple myself.

"Hesitant" doesn't convey the level of fear everyone should feel after reading "Has acess to: All data on all websites".

Same applies to apps, of course.

By the way, I think a pi-hole is safer than an ad-blocker extension, but I'm not sure. What would I be opening myself to if it gets hacked and my DNS server is now the enemy?

As long as you don't blithly accept new ssh connection end points or bypass certificate warnings, you should be fine.

They could track where you go online via the DNS requests ( the sites at least ), and they could mess with anything unencrypted.

Used to be if an HTTPS site loaded an HTTP script resource it provided a dangerous place middlemen could invade your secure session.

chrome, IE ( presumably now Edge as well ) and firefox rightfully block mixed content by default, and have for some time

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Mixed_...

( the mentioned Firefox 23 came out in 2013, so like I said, a while )

Extensions such as uBlock Origin just happen to be important enough that they should not be subjected to these limitations. They're essential browser features that for some reason haven't been integrated into the browser itself yet.

AFAIK the author is just one guy. I'm sure he's the best guy there is, but if tomorrow morning he finds his favorite horse's head in his bed, I wouldn't fault him for including some tiny little script in it, you know, practically nothing!

Isn't this what Manifest v3 does?