Manifest V2 phase-out begins

Honestly until actually looking at it earlier this year I assumed the Lite version was just a somewhat pared down version but people should really look at the screenshots[1]. It's painfully mocking of the change with an intentionally kids-drawing-like UI and seemingly zero configurable settings outside of three sliders.

Edit: typos

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home

Google land never had it. The land with choices is called Firefox, and yet people still believe that it's a slow, bloated, supports-nothing browser.

Google does the advertisement part well, it seems.

For facts: see https://arewefastyet.com

This will be the beginning of an era where Chrome is no longer the browser used by the overwhelming majority.

This guy has two incredible gifts: writing amazingly awesome adblockers, and picking increasingly-awful names for them.

I salute you, sir!

In a sense one could claim that the hash is a "compressed" version of the code.

I am not saying that it is a good solution or anything, just wondering about how "Remote" is defined.

The danger is to their ad revenue, not the user.

Giving more of your PC to websites means you’ll likely use the web more and consume more ads.

Because the main goal of the transition to V3 is to effectively kill adblockers.

As an example of this sort of thing, consider when Firefox removed XUL extensions (Firefox 57, November 2017). This upset lots of people, and did kill many extensions that just couldn’t exist in the WebExtensions world, and hobble others. But it was done for a reason, and if you compare pre-Quantum and current Firefox you’ll find one of two is faster, more secure and more reliable: and it ain’t the old one. XUL extensions imposed a serious burden and prevented concrete technical improvements. Of course, other changes may have been made that you may or may not like so much (e.g. UI changes), but the removal of XUL/XPCOM has been a good thing for the browser in general.

A number of forks retained XUL extensions, but most died fairly quickly because of code base improvements predicated on their removal. There are still a couple around, I think most notably Pale Moon; they’re all now necessarily hard forks. I don’t know what Pale Moon’s more recent web tech feature support is like—I don’t imagine it’s very good, because it can’t take advantage of Firefox’s efforts. https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml paints a fairly bleak picture for the future: things have gone badly wrong already, and they admit that the project is in the long term basically untenable as a general web browser. (That entire article is also highly biased in its presentation of the entire thing, fairly heavily anti-Mozilla and anti-browser-vendors-in-general-though-they-frame-it-as-Google.)

Such forks also rapidly decay in usefulness in another way: no one makes XUL extensions any more, and probably no one will be making Manifest v2 extensions any more. For a while, the likes of Pale Moon may have allowed you to keep using more extensions, but by now, using Pale Moon means that you get fewer extensions than Firefox, and so they lose their appeal.

There are cases where forks succeed in becoming the primary version of the thing; for example, OpenOffice.org has over time essentially died, and its fork LibreOffice has succeeded. MySQL versus MariaDB is mildly similar, though MySQL’s failure is much less stark.

There are also cases where forks have succeeded, with divergence of both. There’s even a good one in the web browser world: when Google forked WebKit into Blink. In that case, both engines were improved by the fork, because WebKit had been supporting two different directions to a degree, and now they could pursue their own individual goals with better focus (both were able to remove lots of code), and both had enough investment to survive. Over time, their code bases have become more and more incompatible.

—⁂—

So… in a few years’ time, probably no reputable Chromium fork will support v2 extensions, and you probably won’t have any reason to want one that does anyway.