Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is uBlock Origin removed from Chrome extension?

43 pointsmagundu48 comments

Today I noticed uBlock origin is removed from Chrome. Can someone explain why?

What are the alternatives to uBlock?

Use Firefox and uBlock Origin. It always worked best on Firefox anyway:

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

The technical reason was that uBlock Origin uses the "Manifest V2" extension interface. The new "Manifest V3" standard ever-so-coincidentally doesn't provide the tools necessary for thorough ad-blockers like UBO.

You should switch to a browser that maintains support for good ad-blockers.

And this is why I agree with the government that Google has to sell off Chrome.

This behavior just pisses me off. “Don’t do evil”, my ass.

In their defense it’s a long time ago they officially conceded on not being evil.

They removed "Don't be evil" sometime in 2018

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

And who do you think is going to buy it? And why wouldn't they do the same?

Because whoever buys it won’t also control search.

Clearly it won’t be MSFT or AAPL, and given other DOJ investigations, unlikely to be AMZN. So I at least feel we have a fighting chance in someone else’s hands.

Fingers crossed of course. But it’s a chance.

Dont know about that..

I do see MS buying it but keeping it as an independent foundation and letting other join to vote and help steer development... I could see Google itself doing this to chromium to avoid loose chrome..

Apple is more unlikely since they do not use Chromiun or Blink for Safari, but give that Blink is a fork of WebKit that is what Apple use in Safari i would not say chances are zero..

Fair.

My guesses would be Oracle, IBM, or Private Equity.

The Apache foundation can take it

The issue here is that in order to do its thing, uBlock Origin requires quite extensive access to the browser context, including the ability to intercept network traffic.

It’s pretty easy to see how this could be abused by malicious extensions, and security is the stated reason behind many of the Manifest v3 changes.

So it’s not clear that this is Google “being evil”, so much as it is trying to force web security forward, at the expense of user experience.

The removal can be bypassed until June 2025: https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1d49ud1/manif...

A nasty and likely intentional side effect of using these workarounds is that your browser becomes "managed" and it blocks the ability to configure DNS for example. Deal breaker for me

You can configure DNS while managed by applying an additional policy, but the browser would still be "managed".

Chrome is removing some features that Origin depends on now. There's Ublock lite or moving to Firefox to keep using Origin.

While some here don't seem to like it, instead of replacing uBlock O, I suggest replacing Chrome with Brave.

Brave is great. Even my Mom uses it and now "hates commercials"

If the DoJ manages to make Google sell Chrome before the new administration, will that stop this disaster?

Probably.

There's no good technical reason why ublock and similar addons are being un-supported, merely Google's whims. If a non-advertising company buys it they won't have any reason to go through with this.

I can only imagine that there will be a whole new can of worms though, trying to maintain a technically complex project with no revenue stream, likely loss of a lot of the core developers, and chaotic management.

It might well recover and turn into a fine project. In the meantime though, firefox seems like the best bet whether chrome is removed from Google or not.

I realize something as complex as a browser can never be done, but would it be so bad if new feature development slowed to a crawl? I suppose I only want a faster horse, but few of the cutting edge developments of Chrome seem like they have much to offer me.

New feature development? No. Security fixes slowing to a crawl though, that would be a disaster.

There's such a huge user base around chrome that I feel pretty confident it will land in a position where that isn't a problem - eventually. The transition could be rough though, right now I imagine it's quite heavily tied to google infrastructure and engineers.

Why exactly would a non-advertising company buy Chrome? Unless they're an OS company and want to use the browser to force everyone to buy their OS?

OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.

There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested, though it would be quite a gamble for them to buy chrome in my opinion.

There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron), which means a lot of money that cares about what happens to it, which could easily influence things.

>OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.

Great, so we go right back to the days of IE6. No thanks.

>There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested

These companies are viable because they get to outsource the bulk of the browser development and maintenance to Google for free. I don't think they can afford to buy and run the whole browser.

>There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron)

This is honestly the best scenario I can see of all the discussion I've read about this, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it brought up before. Still, from what I read on Wikipedia, Electron was spun off from Github (owned by MS now) and is run by a foundation with a bunch of tech company members, so going from this to a whole for-profit company for something that is basically just an open-source wrapper over Chrome's engine seems unlikely.

Probably not. I'd reckon even the other corporate donors and contributors to Chromium apart from Google will be in favor of Manifest V3 and killing content blockers.

Doubtful, but possible. But, there's no way that will be finished before the new administration.

AFAIK there are no Chrome uBlock alternatives, while there is a Chrome alternative with uBlock, Firefox. Beside that, you can set

    "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" = 3;

as see https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/ apparently till June 2025 to keep Manifest v2 extensions like uBlock fully working, I've rebuilt my NixOS with Chromium this morning and uBlock was there so it's not removed at least if you have the aforementioned option set.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/15/24270981/google-chrome-u...

Stop using Chrome if possible. Use Firefox.

I just use brave now. Comes with decent ad blocking out of the box.

brave can use the same filters too

As nobody has linked to it jet https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/... That is the v3 manifest version of uBlock origin by the same author.

In my couple week usage it's the same in blocking as uBlock Origin.

It is the hobbled version of uBlock origin, missing features.

It may do about the same for general ad blocking now. But, advertisers are now aware there's much less potential to drive people to heuristic-capable ad blockers because that now requires more than "install this plugin".

So now, they can be more aggressive about going around ad blockers.

The move to the API seems motivated more by keeping the ad profitability model up than being about technical/security reasons. While I'm glad we're not in the IE4 vs. web standards days anymore, with Edge now also being on Chromium-base, there's too many interests in that one hot spot. How did the old saying go? Power corrupts, absolute power ...

Corruption exists because people refuse to do inconvenient things.

Corruption exists because key internet infrastructure is maintained by corporations with perverse incentives (eg browsers owned by advertisers).

We don't need Google, but it offers convenience.

More discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41809698

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757178

Anyone have a recipe for running pihole on one’s laptop and proxying traffic through it? One you’ve used and can endorse pls. I too can Google. :)

I don't think that's a good idea, it should be a separate, ideally hardwired device (or VM on a host with an Ethernet connection).

But I wonder if you could run the PiHole (or Technitium, or AdGuard Home, etc) in a container with Podman or Compose, and set your DNS to 127.0.0.1? I feel like that would create some kind of feedback loop.

Why not a good idea?? There is nothing that say it should be a separated hardware..

In fact, AdGuard app for iPhone does basically this, it install itself as an always on VPN to hijack DNS queries from apps..

You dont even need containers or VM for AdGuard, it have a windows version that you can install as a service and then just point the DNS to localhost..

For Pihole i seen guide that use WSL to run it locally, but using containers in this case might be easier..

I dont know Technitium so cant comment on it, but quick search it look like it also have a windows version so it might not require containers as well..

It is not the usual configuration but it work.. In this case i would point AdGuard to use whatever DNS is available in the local network so you do not loose access to local stuff..

If you are on a laptop it will require some manuall managing unfortunatelly, but if you are on a fixed network you just need to set it up once and forget about it..

That's a good point about phone VPNs! It feels like this would be counter to someone's recommended best practice, but now I'm curious and might try this on my own :)

basically every adblock on iphone does this, usually as part of a premium paid upgrade..

iOS unfortunately does not have a way for those apps to hijack the OS level DNS... so they fake a VPN to configure thenselves as the VPN DNS server to allow then to capture all the local DNS traffic..

they do this because it is, as far as i know, their only option to do ad blocking for the whole device instead of just for safari..

uBlock origin lite.

It's the best they can do on the new API but it's not the same product.

can you share what's the limitation of Lite?

It's not the same, but in my use for the past couple of weeks it's 99.99% the same

Thanks. How to get back previous configuration in uBlock advance user setting?

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