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Comment by tech234a | Hacker News Reader

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

This is just kicking the can down the road.

The bigger question is how the Chromium forks are going to respond long-term. I suspect the APIs enabling ad blocking are only going to get more clamped down requiring additional work for forks.

Policy-installed extensions can continue to use the WebRequest blocking APIs on Manifest V3 [1], so I would expect that the underlying code for the API would remain available for forks to use.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w...

Brave has committed to do what they can as long as they can. But unsure how long and what that really turns out to be. https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

Like I said before, Brave even has a better solution because it has a uBlock compatible ad blocker _built in straight into its core_ (but its disabled by default). Same block lists, same safety assurances.

Although I still use Firefox with uBlock as my daily driver at home, Brave with block lists and Shields is right next to it (and I use it as my daily driver at work). It works pretty damn well!

That is easy talking from Brave as long as it is still a config flag, then after a compile-time flag. Once the internal APIs for MV2 or where MV2 get removed or changed it becomes very difficult to maintain. Never mind the possible security issues you introduce, but won’t get so quickly discovered, because Brave is a smaller target.

I mean this isn't rocket surgery, carrying a patch set isn't as hard as this thread is making it out to be. Your Linux distro right now is carrying thousands.

Maybe you have inside info, but last we knew, Google needs internals for webRequest for its enterprise Chrome customers. I think this is not the dire situation your words convey.

and its really easy on MacOS, you just have to run

  defaults write com.google.Chrome.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

Another case where windows makes simple things unnecessarily cumbersome

You can’t edit config files on Windows from the terminal?

Not really an expert but PowerShell always seemed kind of more “powerful” and/or complex than bash

These are the instructions for Windows from OP's reddit post: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...

So much more complicated.

It's a one liner in Powershell

New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome" -Name "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" -Value 2 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

>So much more complicated.

Are you one of those guys[1] who doesn't understand files and folders?

Seriously, the only thing you're exhibiting is your abject ignorance of Windows and possibly computers in general which are not something you should be proud of.

[1]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-do...

Its not even that. They say its more complicated but it's basically the exact same thing. Registry entry's are arguably the windows equivalent of a Mac os plist.

Powershell is more equivalent to Python than BASH TBH

Bypass Chrome altogether. Use Firefox.

If only Mozilla (the parent organization) wasn’t horrible.

Can’t a non-crazy nonprofit make a browser?

What's so horrible about it? I don't like how they're pampering to the ad industry now but other than that I think they're pretty decent.

If I donate to your project I hope the money goes towards your project. If you spend it on beer or buy Jacuzzi I'm happy too. If you chose to spend it on other projects ill be excited to learn what they are.

https://future.mozilla.org/projects/

Do you use any of that? Is there anything there I should be using? (honest question) It seems premature to donate to things I don't know.

> Solo helps entrepreneurs expand their web presence with a suite of AI-backed tools for building websites, optimizing for SEO, and showcasing your best work.

> Solo will instantly create a beautiful website so you can grow your business.

> Improve brand visibility: SEO keywords are automatically added to help drive search traffic. View statistics by connecting a Google Analytics account.

I'm very biased no doubt, it reads like I donate to progress the commercial web, more canned template websites, product SEO and to promote the use of google analytics. I'm sure it is awesome to some people, to me it is the opposite, I'm sure it is a project that should exist some place but I don't want to pay for it.

The web browser can still be infinitely improved.

Clicked the future projects link. Thought the DidThis project sounded interesting. Aaaannnddd it's already a dead project as of 2 months ago.

I mean Llamafile is great and is built on fantastic tech, but no I definitely want my Mozilla money to go to Firefox, not what Thing is currently in vogue by Mozilla execs.

> If I donate to your project I hope the money goes towards your project.

Firefox is not a project of the Mozilla Foundation, but the Mozilla Corporation, so you just can't donate to Firefox at all; in fact, the money flows the opposite direction between them. I know it's frustrating but this argument is misleading yet keeps showing up in every thread.

Fascinating, thanks for the explanation/correction, it makes it even worse than I thought.

I don't know about their other expenses, but SEO/advertising is probably one of their better uses of money even if we don't like it. It's hard to gain market share against a browser that is pitched each time you do a Google search no matter how good the product is.

They also fired a whole bunch of software engineers (including everyone working on Servo), and then massively boosted their executives' salaries, so that was certainly something.

As a criticism that applies equally to Google.

Google lays off engineers: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-e...

Google boosts their executive's compensation: https://www.businessinsider.com/alphabet-google-executive-pa...

IMO it’s a matter of principle. Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit that exists to support the development of a FOSS browser and its related projects. Over the years it seems like they’ve strayed from this mission, behaving more and more like the big corporations they claim not to be like

> IMO it’s a matter of principle.

Eh? So Chrome should be used because Google has no principles?

Here's the Mozilla Manifesto:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/

They explicitly state that they want the internet to benefit the public good as well as commercial use.

Principle number 9 is: "Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical."

Mozilla clearly strikes that balance better than Google does.

No, I never said anywhere that chrome should be used. As a matter of fact, I use Firefox myself. My original observation was that Mozilla presents itself as a benevolent non-profit yet behaves like soulless for-profit tech company, abandoning valuable FOSS initiatives and carelessly laying off employees, all while increasing executive pay

Mozilla can't be worse than google (or brave/opera etc)

Mozilla let's me use ublock origin, Google doesn't.

I think you need to be a little bit crazy to enter the browser space. It's not for the feint of heart.

*faint of heart

> Can’t a non-crazy nonprofit make a browser?

Here’s to hoping LadyBird remains non crazy and can be relevant by the time of their planned alpha release in 2026.

To be honest it needs a different name if it’s going to hit critical mass adoption with the average consumer.

What's wrong with ladybird?

Netscape, Edge, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, All have a pop appeal to them (the names)

"Ladybug" makes a reference to a bug. And not a thrilling one.

It's bird though, not bug.

Ladybird is the UK term for what Americans call Ladybugs

Then it is going to be adopted everywhere fine except the UK.

I don't see why it wouldn't. Ladybird Books has been around for 157 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_Books

huh? of all the bugs in the world, ladybugs are among the most popular, the majority of them are harmless and prey on agricultural pests. at least where i come from the association with "ladybug" is "cute".

Ladyfeature

>What's wrong with ladybird?

Honestly all of these x/y names just imply that they are knockoffs of firefox. Which is fine if you want your browser to just be firefox±some feature firefox doesn't include, but not so great if you're wanting to stand on your own branding wise.

Plus ladybird is the less popular name of the ladybug and if you aren't aware of that, it just seems like some weird needlessly gendered name, which doesn't make sense for a browser to have. Plus a bunch of ladybug type branding with red and black dots and such seems cringey.

Just a complete all around fail to consider branding.

With the average English-speaking consumer. You forgot the other 7 billion people, which isn't your fault as it happens here all the time.

You might want to read back through the history of its creator

I have, and it's honestly none of my business and of no consequence to me [0].

[0] e.g. https://text.tchncs.de/latenightblog/ladybird-browser-and-dr...

What are your qualms with Brave Browser?

I'm not convinced that it's much more than a Chrome skin with an integrated crypto scam.

You don't have to use the crypto features.

when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else.

A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.

The crypto part isn’t something you turn off. It’s buried in a menu somewhere. For all intents and purposes, it’s a pretty elegant UX.

You don't need to "turn off the bad features" because they are opt-in to begin with.

I shouldn't need to opt into or out of features that shouldn't exist in the first place, much less in a browser.

You're scraping the paint off with how far you're dragging the goalposts.

Brave has a weird crypto thing, it's on not by default, it's not pushed on you, I don't even know how to turn it on.

Firefox right now today has ads in the URL bar. I'm using Waterfox to avoid all Mozilla's garbage but Brave is up near the top of least shitty.

Up near the top? It literally had a controversies section on Wikipedia due to all these shady things it did, with cryptocurrency and others, I am not sure how worse it can get [0]. I'll take URL ads any day of the week compared to the kinds of things Brave pulled over the years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brave_(web_browse...

The list for Firefox over the years would warrant a whole page on Wikipedia. Browser choices are a who's who of who's debased themselves the fewest number of times trying to squeeze money out of a free product. The current state of Brave is better than the current state of Firefox right now.

I simply don't understand how you could think that about Brave yet in the same breath say that Firefox is worse, what exactly is worse about Firefox than hiding a literally cryptocurrency scam token in the browser itself?

Brave today: Here's a free browser with no ads, built-in adblock and user-respecting defaults. If you want there's also this crypto thing you can try. No pressure, most people don't. We also have an ad supported search engine as our default.

Firefox today: Here's a free browser with ads on the new tab page, ads in the url bar, ads in Pocket, ads for our VPN service, and we let advertisers collect your data same as Chrome with "privacy preservation ad measurement" and you have to turn all of that off. We have an ad supported search engine by default. We also redirect your DNS queries to a third party "for your privacy."

I think people want Firefox to be better than it is in practice because of the historical good will they've built up over the years. I wish they were better too.

Personally I'd much rather have a non-Chromium browser with some unintrusive ads than one with cryptocurrency, perhaps that is where our differences lie. And anyway, with Chromium being upstream with Manifest v3, who knows how long Brave can keep up its adblocking capabilities?

You don't need to turn off "bad features". Just don't use them. Just like the rest of the browser features you don't use, which there are many of.

> when the defense of a project is that you can turn off the bad features, you aren't really making a chase better than say chrome or anything else.

> A product built on trust, shouldn't involve having to go turn off untrustworthy elements.

This is very misleading! You don't "turn off" bad features in Brave. You have to explicitly turn them on. By default it's off.

Just like how you don't have to visit dodgy sites in Chrome; you have to take action to visit dodgy sites.

Same with Brave - you don't have to do any crypto stuff; you have to put in extra work and effort to do the crypto stuff.

I've used Brave for years. Never used any of the crypto features. It is just a solid, privacy-based, chromium-based browser.

At the very least, I do not trust a browser that was putting affiliate links to unsuspecting users' urls [0]. Plus I tbh I am really sick of everything tending to be chromium-derivatives nowadays and I think it is good to have greater diversity, to exactly avoid situation susch as the one here.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10134

If you research all the controversies around Brave, I think they pretty much amount to nothing. Just some people holding grudges.

But the complaint that it's a reskinned Chrome and will be forced to eventually adopt most of Chrome's user-hostile changes is a real concern.

> If only Mozilla (the parent organization) wasn’t horrible.

Well, they're not getting any of my money, and they're not selling my eyeballs to any advertisers. For a while I used a filesystem written by a convicted murderer. I'm not sure at what point I'm supposed to avoid software because of who wrote it.

Firefox on ChromeOS sucks though. Just went through this, tried Canary, etc. Went back to Chrome.

Bypass ChromeOS alltogether. Use a different Linux distro.

I do. But I have a chromebook too.

Just ChromeOS? Firefox on Mac sucks.

Here is one example: Firefox's tracking of the mouse cursor is broken, and often (yes, it's inconsistent) applies a vector translation so when trying to click something like a button or menu, the cursor needs to be about 100 x-y pixels away from the target. Only Firefox native UI is affected. These are My_First_Program.app tier bugs that should not exist in mature, 20 year old software.

Phoenix 0.1 didn't have this many beginner bugs. Mozilla has lost its way and only continues to exist because Google funds them to be a paper tiger competitor. Opera sold out to the Chinese. Microsoft gave up and now simps Google. Apple only supports their own platform. What is left?

I’ve been using Firefox on OS X since forever (never jumped to chrome and back) and I’ve never experienced this. Is there a bug report? Surely this would get a lot of attention.

> Here is one example: Firefox's tracking of the mouse cursor is broken, and often (yes, it's inconsistent) applies a vector translation so when trying to click something like a button or menu, the cursor needs to be about 100 x-y pixels away from the target. Only Firefox native UI is affected. These are My_First_Program.app tier bugs that should not exist in mature, 20 year old software.

While I've not noticed that myself, just yesterday I noticed something similarly weird.

I had a Safari window that was persistently half the screen width and height away from where the mouse was. As in: click to drag, and the whole window jumped half the screen down and to the right, so I couldn't get it to any other quadrant of any screen. Fixed on restarting the app.

I don't know if that was an app bug or an OS bug, but in either case it's Apple's fault.

How did we get to this?

Been using Firefox as my browser since 0.2 (Minefield, Phoenix was later) on Mac since around 10.3 and I don’t recognise what you’re seeing at all?

Can you provide a link to a bug report? I've been using FF on macOS for years and haven't noticed that. Maybe it's just a bug on a random site?

Maybe I wasn't clear - this bug affects me personally, it's not some random tale I read in a forum. No, it doesn't affect the site or page rendering at all. Only the Firefox-native dialogs - like the bookmarks dialog and the hamburger menu - are affected. The bug is likely in XUL. Unfortunately I am too busy to dig through Bugzilla, make an account, etc. only for the bug to be ignored for years like the others...

> Unfortunately I am too busy to dig through Bugzilla, make an account, etc. only for the bug to be ignored for years like the others...

So, if no one reports the bug, how do you expect the bug to get fixed? Instead, you just keep harking back on that unfixed bug whenever Firefox conversations come up and you can be like "but this bug has been around and no one has fixed it"

Are you kidding?

Firefox is notorious for having bugs open in core features for over a decade! I’ve found outright broken code, narrowed it down to the specific line, included documentation references, repro steps, etc… only to be totally ignored by the devs. I did get comments from several thousand other frustrated users, but never a Mozilla employee other than the occasional generic or automated housekeeping message.

Sadly the Mozilla Foundation has been overrun by special interest groups that simply want to suckle at the teat of Google funding. Millions of dollars are allocated to outright corruption, but very nearly zero to development of Firefox itself.

It’s a slow but certain road from here to a sad end.

Why would I or anyone else pretend otherwise? At the expense of our own time and effort no less?

Link to your bug report?

> So, if no one reports the bug, how do you expect the bug to get fixed?

Maybe they should learn how to test software properly instead of squandering their money on nonsense features nobody asked for.

FWIW I used to experience the same thing sporadically on Mac, about 10 years ago. Not just you - but a rare bug.

For me, the scroll randomly breaks and stops work all together for a minute.

I've seen the exact same problem on my mother's Mac and it's making her crazy. Haven't found a corresponding bug report, but it's sort of reassuring she's not alone with that annoying bug

Thanks for confirming I'm not crazy.

So one inconsistent bug, that only happens for a small subset and there’s no bug report filed makes FF suck on Macs.

Hyperbole much?

No, it's one example of an otherwise broken and lacklustre browser. It's the only browser that has issues with website functionality.

Get a real computer.

I have like 8 running right now lol. 3 linux, 4 windows, 1 chromeos.

A decent alternative to ChromeOS would be a great thing

pour one out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

I don't know if this qualifies for your definition of alternative, but ChromiumOS does exist https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/

How can I swap ^W and ^D in Firefox? For Chrome I found an extension that works (…worked?) fine, the only thing for Firefox I found would be compiling it myself, which I find a much worse experience than compiling Chromium myself (neither of which I like doing)

What do those do?

^w is delete word in vim/bash/everywhere else. It’s terrible whenever I accidentally type this in the browser and the window closes. I typically close terminal windows with ctrl-d so I have this mapped in my browser as well. It’s really muscle memory and I do not want to change it

By that same logic, ^w is used as close window everywhere else

Not for me, I hardly use anything GUI apart from my browser. Can’t actually think of anything right now apart from some niche tools. Either way, the fact that I can customise it that easily in Chrome but not in Firefox is a huge factor why I don’t like using Firefox

Not in Windows (pun unintended) where it works only in Explorer.

Patch localization/en-US/browser/browserSets.ftl in your browser/omni.ja (a .zip with a weird file extension), it contains stuff like: close-shortcut = .key = W

See: https://github.com/SebastianSimon/firefox-omni-tweaks how it can be done.

I do this myself as ctrl-n has to be new tab for me, forever, and firefox broke the old keyconfig extension years and years ago. (I had ctrl-n create tabs with an external window manager back in netscape 4 times and opera (pre-chrome-fork one) after that.)

Amazing, thank you!

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