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Comment by Qub3d | Hacker News Reader

The safari change absolutely kneecapped content blockers. Ublock dropped it[0], and the remaining few providers, like AdGuard, have to do all sorts of trickery[1] to get even close to the same performance.

If you're going to argue this is better, don't point us to such a clearly worse result.

[0]:https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 [1]:https://adguard.com/en/blog/safari-adblock-extensions.html

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I'm not arguing that V3 is better -- I think that's a complicated question, and I was trying to describe some of the tradeoffs. What I am arguing is that V3 does, contra my parent, support request blocking.

It does not allow request blocking as that has been understood in the context of extensions until now

It is not a question that V3 breaks the gold standard privacy protecting extension.

I quibble with this. Request blocking "as that has been understood", is preventing the request from leaving the browser. That's still demonstrably doable with mv3. What's changed is the mechanism. You can argue about the value of changing the mechanism, about the burden placed on plugin developers, or the efficacy of various APIs, but the functionality is inarguably still there.

You're being disingenuous. With Manifest v3, it is not possible any more to block requests dynamically which has huge implications for the efficacy of ad blocking (example: forget blocking youtube ads). Additionally, you're limited in how many static rules you can have.

Therefore, it's not just about changing the mechanism, the end result is clearly a lot worse. One can say, they crippled ad-blocking which this change. Hopefully, once the millions of people using ublock origin start noticing what's happening, they will move away from Chrome. I already did, ublock origin is worth more to me than any feature Google puts in Chrome.

I just hate that rhetorical game of "well, prima facie I meet your standard so what's the problem?" You met the standard before too, obviously that's not the problem

Fair point, apologies if I came off a bit harsh. I'm just really frustrated in the direction Google has taken with this whole thing.

I understand the average user probably shouldn't be able to easily hand over so much control to extensions, but on the other hand, dynamic ads shouldn't be able to serve malware or cryptominers.

I'd be a bit more open to the idea of a locked-down manifest if we had seen more good-faith attempts from AdTech to change the paradigm that makes content blockers almost a requirement.

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