Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes | Hacker News Reader

Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

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211 pointstech234a164 comments

> As we head towards Manifest V3 migration, we are intently monitoring comments from the developer community to help inform our timelines.

Here's some feedback:

If uBlock Origin loses full control over what gets loaded and what not, I will immediately uninstall Chrome from all my and my family's devices and switch back to Firefox, after a decade of using Chrome as the main browser. I will then also recommend the exclusive use of Firefox.

Why not offer MV2 and MV3 in parallel, where MV2 is a per-extension opt-in with a prominent security warning during opt-in?

You can just do this anyway, you know. Firefox is pretty great these days.

Especially on macs

I found it's lack of support for native functionality in MacOS too irritating (eg doesn't support system wide autocomplete - so my @@ shortcut that puts my email address in doesn't work in FF - I know I could put it in again in FF but it's annoying it just doesn't work) so I went back to Chrome in the end.

I was using Edge for a while but the absolute car crash their UI has become - and can't be configured - sent me running screaming for the hills.

Edit - and don't get me started on the massive slowdowns once I have more than a handful of tabs open.

My biggest complaint with Firefox on macOS is the lack of support for native picture-in-picture. They implement their own version that doesn’t stay visible when you swap between the virtual desktops; won’t overlay on top of full screen applications; and can’t be moved across monitors (iirc) either.

Now that's weird as PIP in FF always worked fine for me - including swapping between desktops and full screen. In fact I thought PIP in Chrome wasn't as well implemented as took several more clicks to activate.

Can't comment about monitors as I don't use a multi monitor setup on my Mac.

Your experience made me curious, I had to check and it looks like you're right – it does work between desktops and full screens. In fact it even works between monitors. Don't know why I thought it was in such a bad state, but I'm glad you replied. Cheers!

Also it would be healthy for the web ecosystem overall if users, especially power users, would use less Chrome. Any excuse to uninstall Chrome is a good excuse.

I have to use either edge or chrome for work, so keeping a consistent ecosystem for home too works well. I can’t recall why FF couldn’t be used. Windows Hello, maybe? Anyways, when I checked 3 or so years ago, it was a conscious decision on FF’s part to not support an absolutely critical feature. Not having Adblock would be enough reason for me to want to juggle two browsers, but FF is simply not a desirable option right now, as much as I would love for it to be.

Or at least change their user agent to skew the statistics. :/

Statistics come from google analytics, which most Firefox users block. When I compare stats from my webservers with GA, it’s clear that either bots overwhelmingly prefer Firefox UAs, or it’s underrepresented in GA stats.

If the Firefox version is more than a year old, it’s a bot.

Or, the first time I've booted this computer in >1 yr.

I’d really discourage browsing random websites with a browser that is years out of date.

Switched to Firefox for like 6-12 months, eventually moved back to Edge a couple of weeks ago. Had to open it constantly anyways.

I couldn't get used to Firefox's DevTools and the JSON viewer in Firefox is bad compared to the JSON Formatter chrome extension.

Huh. I'm rather surprised you're comparing the out of the box firefox json formatting (rather good compared to chrome's non-existent formatter) to an extension. Are there no JSON formatting extensions for firefox?

I used an extension a while ago, however, it became unnecessary once the built in json view was implemented. Not sure if it's still around or whether it offers any advantage over the built in feature.

Couldn't find any that were on the same level as the one I use with Edge.

Well, Firefox's default JSON view is miles better than Chrome's JSON view.

I wish Mozilla focused more on Linux support. I tried switching to Firefox multiple times, and in day-to-day use I always keep running into unfixable problems like bad font rendering, slow webgl performance, ui glitches etc.

Problems like this never happen when I'm using Firefox on Windows, and honestly the state of Firefox on Linux is kind of surprising since it's the most commonly recommended and preinstalled browser on Linux distros.

Right now I'm using Chromium but I'd be eager to switch if there was anything better which could provide me with a fast and stable browsing experience.

I'm using Firefox on Linux¹ and I have experienced none of those problems. Although I'm not particularly happy with the direction that Mozilla has been headed, Firefox is certainly a vast improvement over Chrome or even Chromium.

1. Latest version of Firefox (not ESR), Latest Debian, both Intel & AMD graphics. I can't speak for NVIDIA graphics on Linux as I gave up on NVIDIA a few years ago.

Admittedly there were a few issues in the past, just nothing in the last couple of years that I can think of.

I was on Linux for about 10 years without a single issues with Firefox until it was turned into a snap package. Slow as hell startup times and other oddities. Removed that and installed from apt and it was back to perfectly stable. Font rendering was always different but I wouldn't say worse. In fact, now that I'm fully back on Windows, the font rendering on Linux is the only thing I really miss. Windows seems a bit blurry in comparison.

It depends on how Firefox was installed, snap and flatpaks are becoming the default for firefox on a few distros every variant of each that I've tried has those issues

I usually have to download the developer edition from the website and setup a desktop entry for decent performance

Agreed, I have the same experience. I switched to Vivaldi lately because of tab groups, I want to switch back to Firefox because Vivaldi has various annoyances but tab groups are keeping me from going back.

Sideberry extension solves this for me

I'll try that, thanks! The issues I've had with tree-style tabs previously was that I use a portrait screen, so horizontal space is at a premium, and I can't afford a thick sidebar always showing.

The font thing in particular is interesting because Firefox is actually generally ahead of Chrome when it comes to most things related to fonts

https://wpt.fyi/results/css?label=experimental&label=master&...

> I always keep running into unfixable problems like bad font rendering, slow webgl performance, ui glitches

Been using Firefox on Linux as my daily driver and haven't seen any of that. Can you provide any examples?

Admittedly there are a lot of variables here, and this may not be a fair test at all, but it's interesting to me that Firefox on Windows loads many web pages much faster (relative to Chrome) than Firefox on Linux loads those same web pages (according to Mozilla's own metrics).

Take a look at IMDb, Imgur, LinkedIn, Netflix, Outlook, Twitter, Wikipedia on the following pages. In all these cases, using Chrome's performance as a benchmark, Firefox performs worse on Linux (often significantly) than it does on Windows. I didn't see any cases where Linux performs significantly better than Windows.

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/warm-page-load/overview?numDa...

https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/warm-page-load/overview?num...

Wikipedia is a shocking case (because it's such a simple site). Chrome loads Wikipedia in about the same time on Linux as it does on Windows (unsurprisingly). Firefox takes almost three times longer!

Again, I don't have any way to get enough data to verify these numbers. They might be incorrect. But if Mozilla's performance metrics for Firefox on Linux are screwy, then doesn't it speak in favor of OP's point that nobody has looked into the issue and fixed it?

I didn't notice it before but I think you're absolutely right about these websites. Thanks for sharing

I can’t report any of those issues, my biggest gripe is Ubuntu forcing a snap package on to me

You need Firefox from the Mozilla PPA.

Yes I know, but requiring me to add a PPA purely because canonical want to push snap is toxically bad faith

> bad font rendering

would I be correct in guessing that you're using the snap? It's pretty, uh, garbage. The Chromium snap keeps having font problems too.

this is fun because the snap works perfectly on my machine, and it's fast as the native version. I think the snap version is far better than running it natively (more secure). A web browser is a hacker's dream.

I specifically mean the font problem, where the system fonts weren't making it into the snaps. Seems to have resolved in recent weeks.

I have been main driving Firefox on Linux for the past six years, on Lubuntu, without any kind of problems. None whatsoever. It's fast and it's rock solid stable.

Edit: some people mentioned it's Firefox snap that has problems. I'm using the apt-get package one.

Crappy font rendering is a Linux problem. The appearance of the same font in different applications can vary wildly. It’s really shit.

The appearance varies widely because everything has incompatible layers on top of freetype, some of which respect your Freetype configuration and others which take... _ahem_... liberties.

It also doesn't help when Mozilla and Google statically-link ancient font libraries in the name of security.

Isn't linking to outdated libraries a security threat?

You need a robust font selection. With few options installed the replacements selected autom6for some are kind of shitty. On arch you can install ttf-ms-fonts other options are available.

> I wish Mozilla focused more on Linux support.

FWIW I use Firefox on Linux every day and haven't particularly noticed any difference from Firefox on Mac. Works pretty awesome on both.

> You can just do this anyway, you know. Firefox is pretty great these days.

Agree to that. Chrome might delay cutting off user control of web content but in the end they will push through what is best for google, in other words what is best for advertisers, in other words what's worst for me. As a public for-profit advertising company, they can't really do anything else.

Firefox rocks!

Firefox is so spammy and not better for privacy. It opens tabs all the time to advertise how much that big browser is taking care of your privacy, while begging for your email to upload your passwords to their server so you can [place minor feature here] reopen a tab on your desktop.

How do I know this? I use Firefox for porn on mobile, therefore didn’t connect it to ANY of my Google accounts, anything, blank state Firefox, imagine my happiness when PornHub greets me with “Hello [NAME] [SURNAME], would you like to sign-in with that Gmail account that you also happen to use for work?”

This single datapoint absolutely proves that Mozilla’s care for privacy is a legend. Like saying “A honest politician.”

Same..

uBlock Origin already has less control in Chrome than in Firefox.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

That list is outdated. For example Chrome supports cname uncloaking.

"Chrome now handles CNAME aliases _internally_" https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106309... aka extensions still dont see it

Why would you wait for this one single thing when you have had so many historical reasons to choose Firefox over Google already? Why wait for Google to piss you off for the thousandth time when 999 times is plenty?

This is probably the only actual thing I care about in a browser, at least between Firefox and Chrome. That and 1password.

That's totally fair. Among other things, I care about supporting a foundation that supports open source rather than an infinitely monied, privacy eroding advertising conglomerate.

I don't have any other major issues with Chrome and I've developed several plugins for it that I regularly use. Is Firefox better nowadays because when I left it, Chrome just seemed better in most ways. Firefox felt like an outdated (design) memory hog.

I don't know when the last time you used Firefox but the answer to your question will always be yes. It's been steadily getting better for many years now. I think it's better than Chrome not just for philosophical reasons but also on the merits.

I encourage you to check it out again if you haven't in a few years. There's been some pretty major changes.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-firefox-quan...

Switch to brave, a browser that unlike firefox has privacy actually by default.

A browser that injected affiliate links and is pushing crypto. I'm not sure if Brave is the solution.

No longer does any of this.

Just switch now, I dumped Chrome two years ago and haven't looked back. Firefox is great, and you can even use it on mobile--with ublock!

If anyone from Mozilla is reading, I want to switch to Firefox. But I used to have a Firefox account with 2fa and lost my backup keys. The best part they won't even let me delete that account and start new even if I sent a mail from that same email account. I don't want to create another Gmail account just for Firefox.

Add a dot somewhere in the user part of the address. This looks like a new address but it is not.

Or, if you already have a dot, remove it.

i.e. Gmail treats

example@gmail.com

the same as

exam.ple@gmail.com

ex.amp.le@gmail.com

Thank you, I didn't knew you could do that to create new accounts.

Another trick is to use @googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com

Because honestly, there's not that many people like you. They know this.

MV2 uBlock Origin is already borked in Chrome, it can't uncloak CNAME-masked network requests.

If they limit our ability to block ads in general, I am going to dramatically reduce my Internet usage even more than I am doing now. The Internet is bad enough already as a platform for enabling mass surveillance and social control. Time to start doing more offline things, such as experimenting with AI on my local computer. To you fascists at GCHQ and other government "thought police" agencies, try stopping that now... Especially a mass movement where many people decide to pull the plug, in the name of intellectual freedom.

Great news. One thing that I'm sure about V3 is that it isn't well thought-out at all. For example, imagine your extension has to cache data for a browser session (across tabs but with a single cache), it's impossible as of now.

The only workaround to do that has a 1MB storage limit, essentially forcing you to have a server-side cache mechanism (redis or whatever) for this trivial use-case.

And worse, Google developers essentially refuse to understand the problem - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=118522...

This seems to be a pattern among Google employees, as least as I'm seeing from the outside.

They have their own company reality bubble, and clashes or inconsistencies with the outside world are met with disbelief.

The customer is always right - except when I think I'm smarter than their stated needs.

The customer, eg. the advertising industry.

Indeed, but it's a problem in engineering society-wide, not just Google. The more I think of it actually, it's just a human problem. Even kids default to this. I wish Socratic Ignorance were taught widely and often in school.

I remember getting into it with a Google person in a forum once. They kept insisting they couldn't do real, portable files in Google Drive for Docs because that would break collaboration. They didn't seem able to understand I didn't want collaboration. I wanted to be able to open my word processor/spreadsheet/etc files in other tools without needing to connect to the internet (predates offline mode). I wanted to be able to back them up somewhere (3-2-1 strategy). I wanted to be able to do automated analysis across all my writing. In short, I wanted to own my files.

They simply could not conceive of a use case that was offline or didn't trust Google to be reliable. I honestly don't think they ever used a real desktop office suite. They had no model in their head to understand it.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

That's exactly the saying that came to mind when I read the parent comment. These people have an agenda, the company one, to advocate for; and won't accept anything else.

Collaboration is the killer feature of the docs ecosystem. You will never convince them to break it for X reason.

I don't want them to break it. I understand why the two needs are incompatible. What I want is a way to opt out at a file or even account level so I can access my stuff in Drive. This is what they could not understand. It wasn't "this isn't possible," it was "why would someone want that?"

Export your Google doc to a word docx and then just save that in Google drive. It’s a portable file like any other at that point.

Nope. Not what I want. I want it to be able to work like office suites have since before Google existed. There is no reason it can't other than lack of priority on Google's part.

Microsoft's web-based stuff does this just fine, just like the offline stuff has for decades. I can edit on an app wherever I am, then have my laptop back home do some magic on the OneDrive folder and process/store/whatever I want, and I never have to invoke a magic menu item to ask Microsoft to let me. It's just there.

I don't see why I have to adjust my workflow for Google's failure of imagination. I've also had too many cloud things decide to limit/remove export functionality to trust it.

For this specific case of MV3, I wonder how many of those developers are actually writing and maintaining extensions. Yeah, I know one suspected motivation of this change is disabling ad blockers but IMO even if we ignore this aspect this migration is planned badly everywhere. If they really wanted to focus on just kicking ass of ad blockers, it would be done much quicker without facing this level of backlashes.

Not just for MV3 (or even Google), but many of those "API teams" actually don't have a good understanding on its actual use cases so the incentives are usually aligned with their own goals and directions rather than the actual customers because what they see everyday is just their code base and some OKR. I guess they really didn't want to miss out the opportunity to clean things up so they put every single wish list into the bucket without much user study and then it's spectacularly exploded as we know.

I've seen a bunch of "internal migrations", which is supposed to be a way easier than this kind of external ecosystem migration. Unless it was planned and executed very well, those teams are usually shocked by the initial backlash and how "creative" their users are. Sometime those teams are able to come up with reasonable compromises, but in many cases they just deny the reality then blow things up (which sometime works if there's not much dependencies though, but many case it's just wasted as soon as upper managements kick in). This is why almost all successful API migrations are accompanied with some sort of extensive user study from the beginning rather than some arbitrary metrics/goals set by themselves.

> For this specific case of MV3, I wonder how many of those developers are actually writing and maintaining extensions.

This is a huge problem, also for the Safari extensions team. Google doesn't ship many of its own extensions, and Apple ships none. Moreover, there's no evidence that either of these companies actually talk to extensions developers—i.e, have actual conversations with them—before shipping extension APIs.

Did Google talk with the developers of uBlock Origin or Tampermonkey before designing MV3? Not doing so is negligence.

Not just Google, all of Silicon Valley. Here on HN, I regularly see comments along the lines of: "Wait, do people actually still use Windows on servers!?"

Yes, yes they do.

In the last 10 years I haven’t had a single contract dealing with a windows server. Im sure that someone somewhere does indeed use it. But it’s gotta be 90%+ now a days Linux.

Selection bias. Do you work in Silicon Valley, at startups, or ex-FAANG places? Are you a "Linux person" looking for work related to Linux technologies such as NGINX, MySQL, Postgres, Apache, etc...?

Here in Australia it's a rare thing for me to see a Linux server. They exist, sure, but are generally in the minority.

I have some self-selection biases as well, but I regularly work for large orgs with more than 10K staff and I've been to orgs with over 1K IT staff, and in all cases Linux servers were 30% of the fleet or less.

By some[1] metrics, Windows Server is about 50% of the worldwide server OS market[2]: https://www.t4.ai/industry/server-operating-system-market-sh...

[1] Market research related to server OS usage is notoriously unreliable, with idiotic things such as counting "NGINX" load balancers as a "Linux web server" even if it is one tiny load-balancer VM in front a whole fleet of Windows IIS servers running ASP.NET. There are also the "hyperscalers" that skew distributions. The FAANGS alone add hundreds of millions of Linux instances, but in huge farms of essentially identical clones. At a single medium-sized customer, they have over 1K distinct Window Server VMs or HA pairs, but they also have 1x HPC cluster with 1K Linux nodes. Do you count that as "1" Linux install, or "1000"?

[2] Again, is it just counting the "for money" market, or just the "list of all systems used for servers, including the unsupported free distros?" Microsoft doesn't publish a separate line-item for their Windows Server revenue, for example, making it hard to determine how much it's still being used.

> Selection bias. Do you work in Silicon Valley, at startups, or ex-FAANG places? Are you a "Linux person" looking for work related to Linux technologies such as NGINX, MySQL, Postgres, Apache, etc...? Here in Australia it's a rare thing for me to see a Linux server. They exist, sure, but are generally in the minority

Huh, here in Norway, for big oil service companies, for government and electricity infrastructure, the wast majority of servers I see are Linux in the cloud.

Last time I saw a Windows server was a month before the pandemic, some old stuff that I inherited from another consultant that had been squatting there since last millennium I think.

Come to think of it, the only place I've seen a significant percentage of Linux was in an energy company in Western Australia...

I think you’re proving his point. That 10% (if true) is probably running a lot of important stuff in F500 companies. You just haven’t been exposed to it.

> In the last 10 years I haven’t had a single contract dealing with a windows server.

Windows is exceedingly rare, from a Silicon Valley perspective. The sales people often (not always) ask for windows laptops, but that's it. Everyone else is Mac or Linux. Servers are 100% Linux in the last decade, before that it was either Linux or Solaris. I've never encountered a windows server in 25+ years in the field and never used it myself for anything other than gaming.

It is hubris. Google thinks it can get away with anything, since they're the market leader. The reality is that a certain number of people will migrate to Firefox over AdBlockers not working well anymore, and will give FF a second life. And those are the people who helped get Chrome off the ground by installing on the computers of relatives and recommending to friends.

This, 1000 times. There is only one thing a monopoly holder is afraid of - losing the monopoly.

Im not sure Google understands they have and profit from a monopoly.

When the EU sued Microsoft, the reaction inside and outside differed wildly. Outside, there was a 'finally' feeling. Inside, Microsoftees went from denial straight to shock. They just could not understand they had become the bad guys.

They still lived in the 80s, where Microsoft was hailed as the saviour from the IBM monopoly. They might admit some individual trouble spots, but did not see these as connected to a bigger problem or core company culture. Microsoft believed their detractors were a small deluded noisy minority, but surely not the common opinion.

Google is in for a rude awakening.

I don't think that's the underlying cause. The Google product teams I've interacted with didn't seem like they cared they were a market leader. Aside from "In the making a good product" sense.

They literally just didn't understand what people not-them were doing and refused to consider it.

I remember I ditched Chrome ~2014 because I had an issue with the default download handling. Maybe auto-saving/non-standard location?

I dug around and found a bug report on it, that had been open for multiple years, with multiple Google engineers looking and commenting on it, and arguing that users would never need a config option to do... what multiple users for multiple years were asking for.

Just raised to 10 MB?

> One thing that I'm sure about V3 is that it isn't well thought-out at all.

that's because it's been invented for the sole purpose of making "breaking effective ad-blocking" look legitimate

And similarly, FLoC was invented for the sole purpose of making targeted advertising look legitimate.

There was also a lot of futile searching for use-cases for Signed Exchange spec, which was just AMP letting Google host and monitor other pages' traffic.

From what I've seen the main purpose is to increase secruity, privacy, and performance of the extension ecosystem. I have seen no sign of mv3 being for breaking ad blocking. MV3 and other parts of chromium have added features that help ad blockers.

That's lie pushed by Google. MV3 removes the ability to block requests, but keeps the ability to observe requests. Great for ads-related spying.

MV3 is more than declarativeNetRequest and the reason why declarativeNetRequest improves privacy is that users are not giving out as overly broad permission. A user may want to block ads, but may also want to not give the ad blocker the ability to observe the requests. Even if the user trusts the developer of the adblocker, there is always the chance they get hacked.

The average user should not be giving out the webRequest enabled for every website to an extension.

It makes sense for the chromium team to periodically evaluate the use cases of extensions and see if there are better APIs that it could offer to move the ecosystem forward.

If that was the case, mv3 would let extensions block arbitrary requests on a subdomain, e.g. "uBO wants to block requests on *.com, Yes/No".

Trying to keep webRequestBlocking around would mean that the performance benefits of declareNetRequest wouldn't propogate an well as it could. The worst offendors of being slow to block requests are likely to be the same extentions who wouldn't migrate to declareNetRequest.

you know what's even slower?

pulling down 15mb of bullshit ads on every single page

There are no performance benefits of declareNetRequest. One regex is faster than matching against tens of thousands of urls.

Are you talking about local storage? If so the limit is 5 MB: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/stora...

>has a 1MB storage limit

They changed this a couple days ago to be 10 MB with Chrome 112.

The 1MB limit was ridiculous. My MV3 extension uses storage.local (on disk) for session data, only because the quota is 5X bigger than storage.session (in ram). I'm waiting for 112 to hit stable so I can migrate to storage.session only.

MV3 also has this bug where extensions just stop receiving events at random. Search `lostEventsWatchdog` for a workaround.

As someone who has made an extension for an actual product, this whole rollout/situation has been an absolute shitshow.

This is, what, the third pause of the rollout?

Google stopped accepting V2 extensions sometime last year, pushing V3 but totally ignoring MANY of the current use cases of extensions that V3 just doesn't work for. Firebase auth, a Google freaking product, doesn't work in V3 (you can make it work with a bunch of "I read it on a forum somewhere" work arounds).

The ONLY reason they're pushing this is to shore up their ads business by breaking add blockers.

This isn't a new pause of the rollout. It is a message giving a general update on changes made to the APIs since the pause announced months ago began.

My reading is that this announcement indicates a new quasi-indefinite pause, beyond what was previously announced. They will probably still phase out v2, but every additional message about this pushes the timeline back further (even if it’s not explicitly mentioned).

BTW, does anyone know how to subscribe to these Chrome updates? I’m kinda surprised not to get them via email, considering I manage multiple Chrome extensions.

The December pause announcement stated it was until at least January 2024. This update still mentions a timeline of next year for v3. I find it hard to read as anything beyond the update of progress which was promised for March when the pause was announced in December.

A few months back a HN user suggested it may be wise to continually delay an unpopular change, im no PR expert but I thought that was an interesting perspective.

Anything that breaks uBlock Origin is a deal breaker. With the chrome team making so many alterations to their plans, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Mv3 broke uBlock Lite for me (used uBlock to control js mostly).

But that wasn't a deal breaker because I got to discover NoScript (still stuck on mv2 but I like the approach vastly better than original uBlock's implementation).

Just waiting to see how this functionality will be handled in mv2 sunset since Noscript has no plans to migrate atm and uBlock lite should be "guttered" for the foreseeable future.

Pretty much, there will never be a "smooth" transition from V2 to V3 when you are purposely trying to kill the most used plugins.

Why wait? Move to Firefox now.

Feels slow in old computers with 4GB and Chrome has a better built-in for freeing up memory from inactive tabs.

But will likely be plagued with performance degrading ads.

And it's still fast in spite of that, which speaks to how far behind Mozilla is.

Part of the difference is that the modern web is built for Chrome. Even checking ones site or service with Firefox for functionality is a bridge too far, much less performance.

I think it has actually become better lately.

There was a time when people threw around "only works in Chrome" like they did with IE6, but for me it seems it has improved somewhat now.

Not sure about that, works for me just fine on many (even old) computers. But even if it was true, I prefer keeping the number of open tabs below 100 if that means not running browser made by an advertising agency. Talk about conflict of interests...

Using 2-3x as much battery as all other browsers on my Macbook is the dealbreaker for me.. I want to use the same browser on all systems when I move..

IME Firefox (esp with the right extensions, like autosuspend tabs) is very light on system resources. A bit more so than chrome. I run only Linux though.

All the "websites that should be a program" (Netflix, Hulu, Slack, Amazon Video) now run great in FF, without my computer overheating. (though some of them might be on the chopping block if they don't quit blocking me from seeing HD content)

I hear Apple does some special magic in MacOS so that on that platform Safari actually works (compared to the ~real~ non-Apple world, where Safari is slow as heck and why would anyone ever touch that with a 10ft pole.)

Honestly I do not think Apple does some special magic on Mac OS for Safari. I settled on Vivaldi (a chromium based browser with built-in ad blocking developed by former Opera devs). It gives battery life not much worse than Safari to be honest. Safari is very nice and snappy on a mac, but the extension support is extremely limited.

Orion has Safari-level battery usage and performance thanks to using WebKit, while providing much better extension compatibility and a built-in ad blocker: https://browser.kagi.com/

It also runs on iOS, even with extension support!

Would Brave maybe work better? But I personally feel a bit awkward about the crypto stuff in it even if it can be disabled. I don't think a browser should deal with these things. However, it might be personal preference... It does offer built-in ad blocking and more.

I also feel weird about all the crypto stuff in Brave. I chose Vivaldi (also a Chromium based browser with built-in adblocker). It's developers include a lot of former Opera devs.

You should get off mac for the same reasons to get off chrome.

if you care about battery life then safari is the way to go.

I've used Brave on Mac, and even with 100+ tabs open, the battery life is on par with Safari (which has a much more limited extension library). Orion is also interesting, and is based on WebKit like Safari. But honestly I can't tell the difference between Brave/Orion/Safari in terms of battery life.

Use brave.

Just fine tuning how slowly to boil the frogs. At some point, they will pull the trigger. My hypothesis is that the various entities that want to work around ad-blockers hold back for now, because they don't want to push people from the more basic blockers to the more advanced ones. Once this is in place, pretty much all adblockers of note are dns based, or semi-static list based...."basic". I wonder if there's a renewed push fighting ad blockers then.

Their goal is probably to slowly ween a tiny group of power users onto other browsers that allow ad blocking while acclimating everyone else to the full ad experience.

Or working on pressuring Firefox to implement MV3.

firefox already implements mv3 as much as they can, but without removing what mv2 offered don't they?

That’s correct. Starting in version 109 earlier this year, Firefox supports many MV3 APIs without removing or deprecating MV2 APIs. To ease the transition to MV3 for extension developers, Firefox extensions can use both MV2 and MV3 APIs.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signi...

Why would Firefox need to implement any of this? It's their own browser running their own engine. Why would they need to implement Chrome anything?

I don't understand this mentality. What do ad-tech companies like Google gain from showing an ad to an unwilling participant? Click through rates are going to crater and people are just going to stop using Chrome.

I thought similarly about AMP. They continued the forced march, and well...

Manifest V3 is a perfect example of "great idea but terrible execution". The ability to have extension pages be suspended when not in use is great. Improving (and having finer grained) permissions is great. It should have stopped there: introduce a new "persistent" permission that extensions can request to stay around permanently, and when not requested, introduce lifecycle events so extensions can properly handle suspension/resumption. Make some tweaks to how permissions as a whole are handled.

Instead we have this abomination which is worse for everyone involved. It doesn't improve performance because it forces extension authors to hack around the broken API, and in doing so waste CPU and memory.

Firefox FTW

MV2 background pages were already by default in a mode where they are suspended when not in use. MV3 doesn't improve on that except to make it impossible to have persistent background pages.

The primary idea is terrible, the good ideas are only there to cover up the primary purpose, kill tracker blocking. Terrible idea, terrible execution.

The problem with being able to request permissions is that the extensions will then not work without it. So in reality you often don't have a choice.

Ultimately of course, it is folly to assume you can have privacy with a browser made by an ad company.

Google is not even close to finishing MV3: "On the userScripts API, the proposal has been merged into the WECG but the engineering work has not started yet." https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/f8f430f1904c2a6fa8...

MV2 is sticking around until at least 2024.

People who want to release a new, cross browser, extension are left in a crappy position.

Chrome won’t accept a new manifest v2 extension. MV3 extensions have lots of problems in chrome, and are even worse supported everywhere else.

Google needs to reopen mv2 to new submissions until they’ve got things figured out, and the other browsers are on board.

I love it when advertisment companies who make money handcrafting the perfect ad for you, analysing your search history, talk about Privacy. Yes, this V3 manifest will break adblockers but think about your pRiVaCy gUys!!!

I don't disagree with you (always follow the money), but on the other hand, who better to understand the privacy concerns than the people who work around them for a living? I would definitely want to listen to them. That doesn't mean we just take what they say uncritically, but their perspective is very important.

onBeforeRequest(), though, is just one of several ways to run arbitrary JS on a 3rd party page within an extension. There's a reason it's "first to be hobbled", and that reason isn't privacy. Nobody can prove intent, of course, but I'm predicting the pace of "privacy improvements" slows considerably after the smart heuristic-based ad blockers are out of the way.

We absolutely should listen to them, and then do the exact opposite of what they want.

Doesn't appear to open up MV2 for new extensions, so if your favorite extension gets sold / goes rogue then alternatives may be crippled by MV3 as it exists today.

If anyone is working on extensions, the documentation for manifest v3 is no longer being maintained. Check out stack overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/chrome-extension-...

There’s one guy (wOxxOm, who isn’t a google employee) holding all of Manifest V3 on his shoulders, including pointing out places where the docs are missing information or simply inaccurate, while Google do very little to support Chrome developers.

“Comments are locked” is always a slap in the face

For those who, like me, refuses to use Chrome but also doesn't want to support Mozilla Foundation (if I knew money would stay with the engineers I would actively support it), please look at LibreWolf.

Unlike certain other Firefox clones LibreWolf is a running fork of the latest Firefox sources.

Microsoft Teams is still broken on Firefox? Linux app was also killed by Microsoft liars.

That's a feature not a bug.

Mozilla had been working with Microsoft to resolve Teams compatibility issues.

Teams users using teams.microsoft.com (primarily Business and Enterprise customers on a paid plan, but also some free/personal legacy accounts) should be able to use Teams without issues now.

However, there is a second Microsoft Teams instance running on teams.live.com. Most Personal/Consumer/Free users of Teams are on that version, and there, Teams is currently showing a "browser unsupported" banner.

https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25070#issuecomm...

Is Google sure of what they're doing at all anymore?

Ultimately the biggest risk here I think is adblockers. It’s the universal extension

So the phase-out won't begin until 2024 at the earliest? Did I read that right? What was it previously, June 2023?

> We will provide sufficient migration time for developers - at least 6 months of heads-up - before beginning any experiments to turn off MV2 in the browser next year

So "next year" is 2023 or 2024?

Given this was posted 3 days ago, I'd say 2024 :)

Yeah, "in the next year" vs "over the next year". English has many nuances.

Or will be when they think they can get away with it.

Every time they try the backlash is weaker and weaker because people get tired, or have other things to worry about.

or they install higher-order ad-blockers, like pihole / diversion

Blocking ads at the DNS level is very limited. All that has to happen to bypass it is the site you're visiting serves the ad data directly or really just from any domain that also serves up info you don't want to block. It also can't do anything to counter anti-adblock mechanisms or to clean up the layout which might have space already reserved for the ads.

Using a MITM to alter the responses is an option, but you're likely to run into issues with sofware and devices not being able to handle a custom CA.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is related to ChatGPT or LLM. Google is aware of the impact LLMs are having and that Manifest V3 is facing widespread disapproval. Previously, Google's strategy was "take it or leave it", so their decision to reconsider could indicate apprehension about the potential acceleration of the ad-based search business's decline.

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