Google is killing one of Chrome's biggest ad blockers
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/56dc974e5d583d6989...
https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/01ac3748984f31885c...
Same way how foxes are supportive of chicken wire.
And browser extensions being malware is more the rule than the exception. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than 50% of browser extensions are sucking up your usage data if not actively stealing credentials.
Manifest V3 is not a net gain here, it is a protectionist move by Google.
Google's monopoly can't get broken up soon enough.
This ruling doesn't seem to have changed anything at Google yet. Amit Mehta's comments indicate that he was nonplussed about how thoroughly and knowingly Google has been destroying evidence for years, another thing which for all their faults, Microsoft and I suspect IBM before them didn't really do, knowing that the courts would catch on sooner or later. Google is special, it's like this company is committed to criminality in its DNA.
And iOS/Mac analogy isn’t holding here, because Firefox is a drop in replacement for Chrome. Not in a sense select either customization or convenience, but select both.
>what convenience are you talking about?
Largest extension support, built in integrations for stuff like casting, translation, image search, etc. It also just seems to have less quirks than Firefox. Not anything game breaking, but fiddling with video calls or tab groups or a half dozen more small features is a lot more intuitive on chrome than Firefox. Even if some of it is just outright incompetence (or malice), like abusing user agents.
It's no single thing, but they all add up.
>And iOS/Mac analogy isn’t holding here, because Firefox is a drop in replacement for Chrome.
In the superficial sense, sure. If you just need to go to 10 websites and need maybe 3 key extentions you'll be fine. Power users will see many subtle differences overtime. You can technically use both, but typically you will spend most time on a selected browser of choice.
The only time I open chrome is to use an occasional WebApp that needs the Bluetooth API or something like that.
At the time it was indeed faster, not really an issue today either. Also the writing was on the wall for quite some time.
I have some delay where a navigation might be delayed some, but Chrome doesn't ever lose input and generally manages to keep going.
Even on a desktop with 64GB ram, Firefox gets slow over time & needs to be restarted when I have a significant number of tabs open. Tab auto-suspend extensions generally "fix" the problem, but it's been frustrating that whatever the on-page performance is in Firefox, the app itself feels so prone to bouts of unresponsiveness.
A zillion insects can swallow an elephant.
Except for that one browser which isn't, we don't use that because they go out of their way to tell tech savvy people to screw off.
But I just don't understand how it could even compare to Google ...
Any ad business Mozilla can "acquire" is a percentage of a fraction of the global juggernaut that is Google.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1dgodfn/youtube_on... - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1cjbsmj/youtube_on... - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bsc0i4/youtube_no...
I've got chrome and firefox with ublock installed. If chrome gets ad plastered I'll probably go firefox more. I presently get forced back to chrome if there's a foreign language comment on X/itter. I haven't figured how to translate those on ff.
However, one thing that could be done is integrate uBlock into a chromium based browser. The removal of manifest v3 would still be painful, but uBlock would survive and we get a browser with exceptional ad blocking capabilities builtin
Rather than hardcode one extension in, re-open the gate to privacy protecting extensions having a lot of tools at their disposal.
There's nothing to stop other people from making specs! The main barrier is that there's such a a limited pool of people willing to go implement.
My suggestion was to get a new browser up and running with good quality ad blocking
Or include it in MV3. Firefox's implementation for MV3 avoids this problem almost entirely by just not getting rid of the specification and integrating it into the new system.
There are technical problems with MV3 in Firefox (it's extraordinarily buggy right now), but my suspicion is that by the time it matures it will be a straight-up improvement over MV2 for both privacy and capability (especially if Firefox ever gets around to supporting extension service workers).
It's not really MV3 that's the problem, it's specifically Google's implementation of it and which APIs they've chosen not to include.
The downside for other browsers based on Chromium is that even if they go Firefox's route, they're all largely dependent on the Chrome web store for extensions, and I think it's unlikely that most extension developers continue to develop Chromium extensions that don't work in Chrome.
Basically anything but Chrome.
This is the extension API change at the heart of the problem.
Any browser based on the Chrome engine has to expend energy to hold to V2 support while embracing the latest engine developments.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...
And I doubt it will happen but if by some miracle people were switching to Firefox due to v2 phase out in chrome it might send a strong signal to keep supporting it.
Firefox's Manifest V3 implementation arguably isn't ready for prime time (it has some pretty egregious bugs), but whenever they finally do get around to dropping Manifest V2 (which I have no idea when that would happen), I'm not really worried about extensions not being able to jump over.
A good read. It's fun exploring and tinkering with all the softwares out there.
Sheep will still continue using Chrome despite their interests being stomped upon.
It's time, if you haven't already.
Does this affect firefox? If so, what alternatives are there? (I know of brave but heard it’s not so good). Perhaps safari? But it feels quite different to chrome and Firefox and will take some getting used to.
This new in-browser-browser can then have a good support for stuff like uBlock Origine or whatever else one pleases.
This way you still use chrome while making chrome irrelevant.
All other browsers and forks will be unsupported by all major frameworks, CMSs, Discord forums, etc. It will be like trying to browse the web with links/lynx.
If I want to do development I can do that in a different browser. Web developers should have all major web browsers installed anyway.
Agree. Even if not a web developer, one can use different browsers for different purposes at the same time.
I'm assuming it's not simply a DNS blacklist, correct? There must be more to it than simply blocking known domains.
Safari moved to a model for content blocking where the extensions could provide a list of domains, maybe regexes for elements or something, offline, then this would be "precompiled" in some way, and all rules from all extensions would be applied directly by the browser in a way that was faster and didn't disclose information about the things being blocked to the extensions.
My understanding of Manifest V3's controversial change is that is basically does this for Chrome.
Why is this a problem for uBlock? Because it does limit functionality a little more. You can't have the user directly pick apart the page in the same way, and blocking lists are of limited size. However Safari extensions have already worked around this by providing their own out-of-band user-defined blocking interfaces, and using multiple blocking lists, I'm not sure if that's possible with MV3. uBlock is one of the more feature-complete ad-blocking extensions, with a community of people who probably use those features more than average, so they're more impacted.
Whether it really ends up restricting the feature set that much I think remains to be seen. It might take more work to make those features work, but I expect the vast majority of users install adblockers and never think about them again, so perhaps that isn't necessary.
Disclaimer, I work at Google, but not on anything related to this. I use uBlock Origin on Chrome currently, and 1Blocker on iOS for Safari.
Is that new ublock less capable?