Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions

androidpolice.com

119 pointsabixb61 comments

While I'm less than enthusiastic about Mozilla's recent entrance into the ad-tech industry, it's worth noting that uBlock Origin is not just still available on Firefox and by far its most popular browser extension, but it's also officially recommended. [1]

IMO uBlock Origin has become an integral part of the Firefox experience. Chrome killed uBlock Origin? Firefox can't kill uBlock Origin. It can only kill Firefox.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?sort=users

Unfortunately Mozilla seems to be working on that

Source?

Probably referring to this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707418

It's super ironic that Google pushes this while literally under investigation in multiple jurisdictions about being a monopoly and abusing it's power.

It seems like the leadership team literally either can't help themselves by maybe just not screwing over their users, or they reckon they're too big to really suffer any consequences.

Maybe they're just content with the outcome either way, potential golden handshakes and all?

That's good, at least more and more people will move away from Chrome.

In terms of HN probably. In terms of all users, probably very few

A few at a time is all it takes.

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Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.

When I access a site I’m downloading some markup. I’m free to render that markup in any way I desire. It’s my machine. My software. My experience. Nothing else should be able to dictate that to me.

Ads are harmful. They are used to spy on and build profiles of people across the internet, gaining knowledge along the way that is intrusive, without consent from who it’s spying on.

Sites are free to make money off their content. There are ways besides ads. Paywalls, subscriptions, donations, etc.

Point is, they can make money in ways that doesn’t require telling their users how to do things on their own computers and doesn’t involve forcing malware and spyware onto their users. Nothing is being stolen. The html document was delivered on the public web internet with no restrictions. It was even delivered with the code to run ads. It was given to the world. How the world renders that document cannot somehow change that into a theft.

> Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.

ublock has always worked for YouTube ads, until the very recent crusade against adblocking.

> Ublock doesn’t work for YouTube ads and never has.

Either you are misinformed, or you are flatout lying. I literally just tried it on Firefox with uBlock and after 10 videos, received 0 ads. See here for more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1etvawp/youtu... A simple Google Search of "does ublock origin block YouTube ads" disproves you.

Maybe something on my end is broken but I’ve ran ublock origin for years and never once has it stopped any preroll or mid roll ad on Yt. Weird.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN thread further into flamewar hell. We're trying to avoid that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I refuse to pay for YouTube Premium primarily due to their forced bundling of YouTube Music.

That kind of just makes sense though. YouTube has music on it, giving you access to the UI that plays it a bit nicer than the regular YouTube frontend doesn’t cost them extra.

I would expect the licensing situation to be very different for music than for normal YouTube uploads. YouTube sometimes[0][1] offers "YouTube Premium Lite" in some countries, which doesn't include YouTube Music. This heavily suggests the music licensing adds cost. Unfortunately, it's not available where I live (New Zealand), looks to still have banner ads (easily deal with by an ad blocker, but still kind of insulting to have banner ads on a paid product), and doesn't even include background play on non-music videos (not that it actually matters in my case, since I only watch on my Mac).

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1d0d1sg/premium_li...

>I refuse to pay for YouTube Premium primarily due to their forced bundling of YouTube Music.

I'm the opposite, I get youtube premium as a side effect of paying for youtube music.

Oh please. There is no "stealing" or "theft" of any kind going on here. What's happening is your server sent us a free web page and we deleted parts of it. We can rip out and trash the ads from magazines and newspapers too.

If you don't like that, then don't send people free web pages when they make HTTP requests. Make your web server return 402 Payment Required instead. If you send us free stuff with garbage included, don't blame us for deleting the garbage.

Every browser should have uBlock Origin. It should be literally built into the browser in fact, only conflicts of interest prevent that.

Not really, stop lying to yourself.

Somebody has to pay the compute bill and ads are mechanism to get some €€ back.

I do use ad blockers cuz a lot of sites are too ads heavy, but at least im not making up some ideology that im not ripping somebody off.

Be genuine and honest with yourself

>Somebody has to pay the compute bill and ads are mechanism to get some €€ back.

From the parent comment: "If you don't like that, then don't send people free web pages when they make HTTP requests. Make your web server return 402 Payment Required instead"

Because what? It isnt the only solution and has *significant cons*.

If you prefer radical / extreme approaches, then do it with your content

My computer will do whatever I wish with the content that is sent to it, including removing ads, it is not stealing.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have heard that the real underlying problem concerned resource usage (ten thousand regexp matches etc). But only now do I wonder why the browser's reaction is to remove an API instead of to limit the amount of CPU extensions can use.

The browsing experience is dramatically faster with uBlock. The thousands of regexps don't come close to the CPU or memory load of ads.

A 386 could handle a regexp fine. Compare that to audio or video decoding for ads. Not the same ballpark by orders of magnitude.

It's dead because Google makes money from ads. I shifted to Firefox ages ago.

I traced the CPU usage on my wife's laptop many years ago. That wasn't a fast machine, but it wasn't a 386 either. The ad blockers were her performance problems, alone.

If the browser maintainers have seen a couple of machines with similar problems and maintainers of regexp-using add blockers simply insisted that their code was fast, "a 386 could handle" etc, I can easily see how the browser maintainers might lose patience. Don't need to assume ill will.

My comment wasn't that every ad blocker was performant. My comment was about uBlock specifically.

My comment wasn't that all algorithms are always efficient. It was that properly compiled regular expressions are.

Extensions often lead to performance issues.

uBlock is one of the good ones, but for the rest of extensions, the majority of them are literal malware. Usually originally developed by someone decent, and then sold off to someone else who uses them maliciously.

It looks like the recent changes are all about slowly locking down what extensions can do because it’s currently a free for all where random anonymous extension owners have full access to everyone’s browsers.

> It looks like the recent changes are all about slowly locking down what extensions can do because it’s currently a free for all where random anonymous extension owners have full access to everyone’s browsers.

The major browser vendors already have extension "stores" that are supposed to be curated. I believe it's also true that installing an extension directly ("side-loading") is usually disabled by default (or just not an option at all).

They've done their due diligence for our "safety". Now, it's just bullshit to prevent us from blocking ads, trackers, and spyware.

They aren't "curated" at all, and malware regularly slips through.

Firefox's are, nominally, reviewed. I don't know if Chrome's are, but I would've assumed that they are- even if by some automated tool(s).

Granted, I'm sure malware slips through. But, what security danger is there to a user if an extension blocks a network request? Manifest V3 eliminating the ability to block network requests is NOT for user security. The absolute best excuse they can come up with is that it has something to do with performance, but that's also bullshit because I'm 99% sure I can find plenty of ways to make a Manifest V3 extension waste CPU and/or memory.

I agree with you on everything except word choice. Standard review processes are far from what I think of as curation.

No competent content blocker tests "ten thousand regexp matches" for each request URL to match, this is not how it works.

To simplify, and speaking from uBO's perspective, consider that nine distinct tokens can be extracted from the URL in the address bar for the current webpage:

  https
  news
  ycombinator
  com
  reply
  id
  41758007
  goto
  item%3Fid%3D41757178%2341758007

To match such URL against the tens of thousand of filters, there is only a need to lookup filters for these nine tokens, and for most of these tokens there won't be any filters to test, such that in the end for any given URL only a few to no filters will end up being tested, and the majority of these filters are not regex-based, they are just plain string matching.

This is the overall simplified explanation of how it really works, in reality it's a bit more complex because there are a lot of other optimizations on top of this.

There is a built-in benchmark tool in uBO, accessible through the dashboard, _Support_ pane, _More_ button, _SNFE: Benchmark_ button[1].

When running the benchmark against a set of 230,364 URLs, I get an average of 11-12 µs per request to perform a match test against the default filter lists in uBO.

* * *

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-settings#ben...

I use Firefox so I'm fine.

But what should I do with the not so tech savvy family members and friends that use Chrome and I installed Ublock origin? Install the lite version? Other alternative?

I'm sorry to say that will be impossible to make them switch to Firefox.

AdGuard it works on every platform and works with MV3 better than uBlock Origin Lite.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-browser-extension/overview.ht...

https://adguard.com/en/blog/chrome-manifest-v3-where-we-stan...

Thank you. Looks polished and trustworthy.

Do you know if it has nagging with upsells to the paid products that they offer?

Nope. Doesn't nag you to use their VPN or anything.

If Adguard is able to work on MV3 why isn't uBlock able to ?

Brave might be an option. They have their own ad blocking functionality and the full ublock origin (if that team keeps updating it for chromium) will keep working. People say they have done shady things in the past but the browser is open source so that doesn't effect MY decision to use it for the time being.

Thank you but will be too difficult change browser. They usually have the whole Google ecosystem, for example password autofill on Android is not good with Firefox pass manager, with Chrome the UX is good. Stuff like that. I know is sad but I don't want to create issues on they digital lives.

Change the Firefox icon to a Chrome icon.

This may sound impolite, but what you should do is to tell them to use Firefox. When they don't or say no, then that's that. It's not your problem and you should not feel obligated to enable or mitigate their poor decisions. If they can't manage their computing affairs without you, then they have to start respecting your professional advice.

Life's too short.

Isn't impolite, is all good. But I don't want to deal with the possible issues, sorry.

For what is worth, I use Firefox (plus many extensions including UbO) to do banking, connecting to government sites, medical stuff, and other non-trivial-surfing tasks, and the worse thing I encountered ever, aside the occasional harmless misaligned box or font, were a local hardware store whose search doesn't seem to work, and an online musical instrument shop (thomann.de) whose pages scripts sometimes hang, but as I wrote I run a lot of extensions so I'm not sure if those are FF issues or not. Everything else, and I mean really everything else, just works fine.

Accept and let go of the fact that good people you love make bad life decisions. Life becomes much easier after that.

Isn't Chromium open source? How hard would it be to fork and restore Manifest V2? I'd expect the functionality to be fairly isolated so that easily tracking upstream becomes manageable.

I think you underestimate how complex browsers are, it's not as if it's just an isolated part of the browser, it's huge and full of moving parts, good luck maintaining your own fork of Chrome especially if you want to also get security updates.

Brave is a Chrominum fork that has pledged to keep supporting manifest V2 (at least partially) beyond the removal in 2025: https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

They don't have a separate addon marketplace. The browser may still support the API but distributing the addon will be a problem.

We need an altstore

Brave's shady crypto strategies [1] and history of injecting headers and affiliate codes in your navigation [2] makes it an untrustworthy browser to me.

[1] https://coinfomania.com/brave-browser-users-monthly-bat-rewa...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...

Do you also say that about Firefox's shenanigans, like that one time when they shared the browsing history without user consent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox

How about more recently, when they enabled “privacy-preserving attribution” without user consent?

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/

It's like them, after all, they also include a unique ID with each download, that then they send in their opt-out telemetry.

How about Firefox's sponsored links in the New Tab page?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy

I am asking because this community has a serious double-standard. This isn't about any “shady crypto” or affiliate codes being inserted, issues which were promptly fixed. It's about something else entirely, and people are being disingenuous about it.

No one could have predicted this.

Does anybody know if/how this will affect Chromium-based Iridium browser ?

https://iridiumbrowser.de/

So the ideal browser is a concept that is every day more and more elusive.

For my private use, I am using an older Mac with some memory consumption issues, so until I upgrade, I am using safari because it's the most lightweight, and while the extension support is the smallest of all, at least for very major things you are still covered.

For work, the Mac I am using is way more powerful, and yet I find strange issues. Vivaldi dies if I open more than 60-70 tabs at once but it doesn't even really matter, because all the Chromium based browsers that have said "don't worry, we will keep maintaining Manifest V2" feel like they are on a "danger zone" to me.

And then, I try to use Firefox and while the extension support is the most complete, many times I am finding unresponsive pages (usually tools like Google Meet, which I need to use because of work) or even worse: profile files get messed up and I start getting an error "There was an error, that's all we know" every time I try to log into any service using Google SSO.

So to summarize, at this rate I will have to migrate to Qutebrowser... or Lynx.

>For work, the Mac I am using is way more powerful, and yet I find strange issues. Vivaldi dies if I open more than 60-70 tabs at once but it doesn't even really matter, because all the Chromium based browsers that have said "don't worry, we will keep maintaining Manifest V2" feel like they are on a "danger zone" to me.

WRT ad blocking, any serious Chromium-based browser that has vowed continued V2 support already has a performant ad blocker in its native code to cover their ass on this point you're making here (see: Brave; though also Orion, of the ones that I know, which is a Webkit browser). Of course, effective dynamic ad blocking isn't the only thing lost with Manifest V3 but definitely the most noticeable.

How old is the Mac? Does it have soldered RAM?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com