Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone
The latest version of Chrome (138) removes Manifest v2 and all extensions that rely on it.
I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
Google has billions and billions of dollars to throw at Chromium; I doubt Brave has anywhere near that kind of money. The longer it stays fully forked from core Chromium, the harder it's going to be to pull in updates, and the more expensive it will be to maintain.
There is a reason I stopped using Chrome-based browsers years ago. Killing V2 was never anything but a play to make sure people see ads under the guise of “security”. While there is some security benefit, the main benefit is making sure Google is the only one spying on user’s every move.
This is what you get when people trust their browser development to a monopolist instead of a consortium. You get fast and shiny bells and whistles with support for the latest whatsis, but you also get this.
"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.
Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.
It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.
Librewolf is the way to go now.
Regardless of one's political applications, I do agree who you are elsewhere shouldn't matter unless you actually start spewing that in an inappropriate context.
To the left of oligarchy? I thought it was anything to the left of getting hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer that they labelled as communism? There must have been a massive leftward shift in society since I last checked the news!
Anyway sounds like you're trying to convince me to use it
Can you imagine the outcry if they'd said the opposite...
Also, it seems quite vague to me exactly who/what company/entity is behind it.
It seems waterfox (?) has a legal entity behind it for your exact reason!
Signed binaries ensure that the software comes from a trusted source, reducing the risk of tampering and malicious modifications.
I have had crashes with Firefox in a long time.
I use a vertical task bar on KDE and a vertical task bar on Windows at work. It's such a huge productivity boost. First, I can see WAY more window previews at one time than before. And second, I can use text to tell the windows apart. 5 Excel workbooks open? No problem, they each have a name. No more clicking on one icon and then squinting at window previews to see which one you need.
And as someone who actually lived through the "IE is the standard, deal with it" - age, I refuse to use any Chromium based browser out of principle. We need more actually viable engines in use or Google will just keep dictating what's allowed on the internet by the fact that Chrome has something like 90% market share on desktop browsers.
In the same way we should chastise the platforms that choose to enshitify, we should praise those that hold out.
But there's no assumption of interest. It's a fact. Not only that, but they did it before. Remember when they removed XUL?
I've moved to LibreWolf personally
'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
Correction, they said personal data, which if you go by the EU's definition means "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual".
Which wouldn't be "anonymous stats", and can you give an example of a jurisdiction where sharing "anonymous stats" would go under selling personal data?
And is "doesn't sell your data to advertisers" also too broad? Because they removed that part too.
Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
From the page they launched, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
> It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Specifically,
> Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love.
If you consider GDPR, even the suggestions on the new tab could send data to third parties and wouldn't be okay with this.
Any request done to a third party server, would send them your IP which is PII under GDPR.
I tried to look up Mozilla's definition for "personal data" first but could only find "personal information":
> For us, "personal information" means information which either directly identifies you (like your name, email address, or billing information) or can be reasonably linked or combined to identify you (like an account identification number or IP address).
And again, what's a jurisdiction where sharing anonymous stats would conflict with "we don't sell your personal data"?
They mentioned CCPA as an example but they define a sale as the "selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration"
But they define "personal information" as "personal information includes any data that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household, directly or indirectly" so "anonymous stats" wouldn't conflict with that, would it?
Legal department would probably go with,
> if there exists the possibility of a way to de-anonymize any individual in the dataset then the dataset is PII.
Why open themselves to the possibility of lawsuits and fines when they can change the terms.
Without it, browsing is unbearable. I wonder if they're not allowed to do so because of their contract with Google?
I use Firefox on other devices and use the sync functionality so prefer to use it where possible.
My home router (Draytek) is also configured to force any connected devices to use NextDNS too.
Definitely worth the €20 annual subscription.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
> Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
This however is a good time to export any extension preferences, because once it's removed you won't be able to access them.
Why would they do that?
... except that we already execute remote JavaScript on our browsers constantly. And we do it, usually, unconsentually. Versus extensions, which are a deliberate thing you need to install.
There should be a browser that doesn't assume their users are stupid. I want to turn off CORS I want to be able to modify the DOM and inject whatever the heck I want.
Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.
But of course today there is little reason to not use Firefox.
Perhaps uBlock/uMatrix needs its own browser.
Mozilla is "all in" on surveillance advertising. From its press releases and strategic initiatives (for lack of a better term), it appears to believe online advertising is essential for the www to exist. Whereas, it has never stated that "ad blockers" are essential for the www to exist.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1itw1bz/end_o...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...
For me, I choose not to manually update my ungoogled chromium to version 138 and above.
I’m voting with my feet.
While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.
The experience has been a delight. It runs smoothly, I can customize it more than Chrome (compact mode being one example [1]), and with the official iCloud Passwords extension I get to use the same password manager I use on my iPhone.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Best part being, if I need something that Chrome provides and Firefox doesn’t, I can potentially implement it myself, and contribute to a proper open source project while I’m at it.
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...
- Various integrations, such as password managers. - uBlock Origin - Temporary containers - so even those sites that save cookies, are really saving them ephemerally until that container closes.
Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.
Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.
The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.
Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.
Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.
I miss Chrome but won't go back without UBlock.
Hoping Kagi's Orion browser gets better.
It's fine. My issues with it are few and far between. It's a little worse on android but small price to pay for ublock and dark reader imo
Five lines of code still requires one dev, one PM, and one manager. It still requires security reviews, audits, and so on. There are no free lines of code in a commercial code base.
I mean, revenue totals aren't a measure of capability, will, or want.
The problem here is $17B ad revenue MS is earning https://www.emarketer.com/content/microsoft-s-ad-revenues-gr...
Chrome 138.0.7204.101 uBlock Origin 1.65.0
Can you imagine just how stupid it would be for governments not to provide another software for accessing it? If they didn't provide something, internet giants would be able to dictate their only means to communicate with citizens. Influence elections. Even lock out governments from their own countries. How moronic would a government need to be to risk that happening? Plus it would be unrealistically cruel as well, because it would of course deny access to the poor.
So no worries. Governments care about people. That's what they keep saying. So they have surely prevented something like this from happening, or provide an alternative.
Right?
They basically strip out all the anti-privacy, anti-user "features" from Firefox.
Just curious.