Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension
neowin.net
neowin.net
But in the same way that an individual human might do something with a subconscious purpose and plausibly claim they weren't aware that's why they were doing the thing, so too can a organized group of people do something when it suits their collective purpose. The group drifts into a behavior which is advantageous, someone in upper management is pleased with it even though the drift wasn't steered, and encourages more of the same. As that process iterates, it becomes clear why they go in that direction all without some Senior VP telling everyone at a department-wide meeting to go in that direction.
Popup blockers were also a differentiator, once.
Just imagine if Netscape and MS made all their money from popups at the time.
The ad folks don't work around ubo lite now, because they understand it drives people to ubo actual.
Once that option is not really reasonable for anybody not highly technical... That's when the fun begins.
Makes switching easy.
I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.
Because pretty much all their revenue comes from Google.
Donate if you can!
Why would Google destroy the cover they have for keeping control over Chrome and 70% of internet users, just to squeeze a bit more ad revenue from what, 2% of users?
I'm not knocking Mozilla for taking money from Google, it was a smart move. Most users would use Google anyway, so Mozilla pocketing billions by making users preferred search engine the default didn't really hurt anyone. Some of that money should however have gone into a trust or some type of investment so that funding for browser development would be safe if the ad money ever dried up.
Maybe someone at Mozilla knows something I don't, but there doesn't seem to be much planning for the future.
Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary?
The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
Wouldn't it be technically no because Google's revenue isn't 100% from ads? They're making almost $120bn from cloud, subscriptions and devices for example. It could be cloud money. And if Google gets ad money so whatever it pays becomes ad money, then it's ad money all the way down.
FYI last fiscal results from Q1 of Alphabet, Google Cloud made $20bn revenue Q1 2026, up from Q4 2025 of $17bn. It's a bit misleading to include "subscriptions, platforms, and devices" in cloud.
Q1 2026 Google's revenue totalled $109bn, of which $77bn is Ads, so 70% of its revenue is Ads. It's common knowledge that Google is an Ads company.
I googled the money they made from cloud, subscriptions, platforms, and devices, then approximated almost $120bn in a year. The precise number mattered less than the fact that it's a ton of it already, enough to cover a lot of payoffs.
> It's a bit misleading to include
I didn't "include in" anything, it was an enumeration of things that aren't ads. "Google makes $Q from X and Y", not from "X included in Y".
You found something that's technically correct (a clear enumeration and addition) to be misleading. I think you now accidentally understand what was my initial objection. A lot of other people in the thread don't because that's how social media works, they go with the prevailing opinion for the sweet sweet likes, or go against it and get squeezed out.
Isn't Google also a cloud giant?
Felt more like their cloud services were more of a side product for when "the cloud" was the trendy buzzword and a way to justify their infrastructure costs. That and keeping a leg in the egg & spoon race.
Too much dependency in Google[0].
--
They weren't back then but are now: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/advertising/mozilla-anonym-raisi...
- Directing people to Google Search means Firefox users get exposed to ads
- The money given to Firefox was made selling ads
- Google is an ad company
What I want to say is that calling it "ad money" makes Firefox look bad when it shouldn't.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/airlines-b...
As in my reply further below, Q1 2026 you can see Google makes 70% of revenue from Ads, the non-ad money you refer to is only 1/3. But if you look at net income, 85% of the net income from Google comes from Services (including Ads).
The Airlines story is taken out of context and different from Google, Delta for example in the Q1 2026 filing you can see they have a revenue of $15.8bn, of which ticket sales is $10.7bn ! Loyalty program income is just $1bn. However the net income supports the story The Atlantic ran, which just means that out of the $1bn, they are getting more net income from their mileage programs, than income from out of $10.7bn ticket sales, because the operating expense of flying airplane is quite high from fuel, etc.
So on one side, Google has 70% revenue from Ads, and even more % if you count net income. On the other side, Airlines - like Delta - have 70% of their revenue from passenger, but relatively speaking less net income from ticket sales if you consider net income.
You are not comparing the same thing. If you just compare revenue, Airlines cannot be called Banks because they still make 70% of their revenue from passenger ticket sales, just as how Google is an Ad company because their main revenue is 70% ads!
If you compare net income, the airlines story can have an angle, but the Google story doesn't, because their net income from Ads is way higher!
Now everyone comes out of the woodwork with "well akshully" because there's an interpretation where they can plausibly claim "technically I'm right" despite knowing they are sending the wrong message.
Basketball player LeBron James made more money from endorsements than sports, gas stations make more money from selling coffee and food than gas, and fast-food giant McDonald's makes more money from rent than from fast-food. If you called a gas station "a grocery store" you'd be technically right but also practically and pointlessly wrong.
You could say Google has two purposes of funding Firefox:
One is to inject search engine and ad distribution dominance into every known browser.
The other is to prop up Firefox as an alternative browser to avoid monopoly lawsuits.
They're not sponsoring Firefox out of goodness.
Which is why I don't like to be charitable with the interpretation.
The article you link to does!
Yes. You can think of it like "blood money".
This does not make any sense and there is zero evidence to support it
Firefox's value to Google could be as a source for browser development. As part of the agreement between Google and Mozilla, perhaps Google gets more than just search traffic from Firefox, perhaps it also gets collaboration with Mozilla on software development. There is a history of such collaboration. Google CEO did not want competition from Mozilla on a browser. Chrome was originally written by ex-Mozilla developers using components of Firefox^1
1.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121018180015/https://www.compu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200805000248/https://blogs.wsj...
If money gets short, the first thing they would cut would be a browser.
I am absolutely knocking Mozilla for taking Google money.
It would be a shame to lose the Mozilla foundation/Firefox but it wouldn’t be the end of the browser.
My fear is that, let's say Mozilla falls or shrinks considerably. It would take only a few complex but rationalised technologies from Google via chrome for Firefox and it's derivatives to fall behind. It already feels like they are constantly chasing instead of innovating and it wouldn't take much for them to fall behind on even that.
Personally, when they killed of the Servo team, that was a sign of their future. It was the team that was prototyping new web technologies long before they were mainstream ready. A lot of their stuff had been deployed into the main releases to great effect. The huge performance jump when they switched to the Quantum rendering system on version 68+ was a lot of their work. Then a few years back Mozilla just killed it off. It basically said they don't want to consider future technologies they are happy following. I don't see Firefox going away anytime soon but I'm not sure what shape it will be in a decade.
I was also sad to see the servo team shut down and a lot of the Foundation decisions the last few years have caused me to raise an eyebrow, but ultimately I just want what I listed above.
God help us.
Maybe after few another "we are switching from language X to language Y" blogposts.
Mozilla literally advocates for an "online advertising ecosystem"
At present Firefox is designed to send search traffic to Google by default
Mozilla can only see its continued existence through support from advertising. It does not just partner with advertising compaines, it actually acquired an adtech company
Google has a history of "shaking the cushions" by targeting their advertising customers and Chrome. It's reasonable to forsee that they could also target the agreement with Mozilla, i.e., Firefox
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-found-a-sneaky-way-t...
https://nypost.com/2023/11/29/business/google-ad-chief-jerry...
Maybe Mozilla breaks its partnership with Google, who knows. But based on a long history of Mozilla advocacy for online ads and working with online advertising companies, it seems 100% committed to online advertising as a "business model" regardless of whether it partners with Google or another "search engine"
Take a look at Firefox’s market share, or Brave’s etc.
Gecko, WebKit and—hopefully—Ladybird are the true alternatives. I used to think this was too extreme. But the ad vendor dragging ad blockers out of the engine flipped my view.
No idea if they will fight to keep UBlock Origin accessible or not.
I think and certainly hope that Helium will fight the good fight.
They said they could offer limited MV2 support even after it’s fully removed from the upstream Chromium codebase.[1]
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
I use brave on my phone and I can't really tell the difference from desktop browser+UO, so I guess it works well enough.
but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;
For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Really hoping the uBlock will continue to work on that project...
I don't think any of this is caused by add-ons, though.
But it's getting better, and most of those problems are just gone;
Still, I keep Chrome around just in case.
1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents
2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat
I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-...
Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well!
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.
But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.
It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.
Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.
Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.
As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.
Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.
Self-fulfilling cycle.
Oh, and Microsoft Teams for a super long time (haven’t checked in a little while).
Theres dozens of examples tbh.
Can't speak to the other two. What does the console start screaming about when you try?
1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.
2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
And I don't think your first point is quantified correctly and I am sure there is no data to back it up. But I understand the appeal of trying to quantify your personal experience.
On Windows Firefox and Chrome canvas has performed equally well at least for the past ten years. Got no data for linux tho.
This is a non-issue, if the devtools is opened, checkbox for "disable cache" is is checked by default.
> When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
How can you be developing front-ends and not have the devtools open while doing your quick edit-test cycle?
Here comes the problem. I don't see how this is justified.
Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something. And lastly chromium the most popular browser flavor and as a web dev it helps to see pages through "the same eyes" as my users/customers.
That's about it, the only reason I use firefox every day is their superior picture-in-picture player, chromium one is waaay inferior.
I'm skeptical; You're probably measuring Chromium + ads against FF + ads.
The only fair test is testing agains FF + uBlockOrigin. And there, FF wins hands down.
> Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something.
This is rare in my experience. And most were fixed with an extension to change the user agent string. Or were for amusement and used a new Chrome feature. Or used a feature Mozilla rejected for security and there were alternatives.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/workspaces?for...
Recently I found they added the ability to auto-sort and group tabs via Copilot, probably the only thing I've found the non-GitHub copilot to be genuinely useful for.
Isn't Brave based on Chrome?
Personally I think it is really stupid to choose a browser based on privacy. I choose a browser based on usability. Whats the selling point of Brave? That it hides ads?
Safari's OK if you're on Mac. I'm on Windows 11. Chrome looks tight, the tabs look great, my bookmarks bar looks great and I can fit a ton of bookmark folders on there. Firefox looks worse in almost every way.
As in: you don't care about your privacy?
I do have to keep Chrome around on desktop due to VirusTotal + reCaptcha setup to be purposely onerous for non-Chrome users. I'll get caught in loops trying to scan files after only scanning a few where I'll get like 5 absurdly vague captchas in a row. You must solve all of them in a row or it starts over from the beginning. It does this even if I'm logged into Google, logged into VirusTotal, and have uBlock Origin disabled on VirusTotal.com. It appears to be by design. So, to ensure I get to scan all my PortableApps.com releases, I have to use Chrome.
Orion (https://orionbrowser.com) is a WebKit-based browser for Mac, Linux, iPadOS and iOS that supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions natively ⟩ including uBlock Origin.
We have no plans to drop extension support. Content blocking is a feature, not a loophole, and we think users should have full control over what runs in their browser.
The original Unix philosophy (McIlroy, Ritchie, Thompson) says nothing about source code licensing. It’s about programs that do one thing well and work together through universal interfaces.
Open source is a distribution and licensing model; conflating it with software openness misrepresents those core tenets. Orion supports Chrome extensions, Firefox extensions, and standard web APIs — that’s interoperability in practice.
That being said, the future is not written ;)
This has been reported for some time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203237
Could you please clarify?
Because it sounds like uBlock Origin works on iOS, when in reality it doesn’t and probably won‘t in the forseeable future.
uBlock Origin never claimed their Firefox extension works in Orion. So I don't think they need to respond.
Instead I'd like a reply from the Orion PM, because they are the ones throwing around seemingly misleading claims about their product.
I loved Orion and have been using as a daily driver almost since day 1 including paying for it but now it’s completely unusable. I’ve since moved to Firefox.
The fact that a pinned thread was silent for months concerns me about the future of Orion. It honestly hurts to see.
Kagi has a good rep; misleading comments like this hurts it.
Here you go, official beta flatpak:
By default is it almost impossible to distinguish which tabs i active in some situations. I think the browser automatically tints the window based on the dominant color of the page you are viewing, which means if I am viewing youtube for example, the whole browser windows is tinted a bit darker, in such a way that I can't easily make out outline of the currently selected tab.
Such a bummer for what should have been an easlity changeable behavior with settings: I do not want any tinting, and I want hight contract mode
You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:
* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation
* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.
* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.
I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.
This issue persists on other browsers with ad blocking extensions? Including on iOS with FF Focus enabled. Is there a browser+extension combination that does not have this issue
Some context that might explain (though not excuse) the situation: unlike browsers built on Chromium or Firefox/Gecko, Orion was built from scratch on top of WebKit. No fork, no upstream codebase to pull from. That means every feature, every integration, every compatibility shim is ours to build and maintain. Browsers that fork Chromium or Gecko inherit years of battle-tested extension support, rendering fixes, and platform work for free — we don’t.
On top of that, the macOS team is 3 people. About 70% of our engineering time goes to maintenance and keeping up with WebKit/OS updates, ~20% to third-party app compatibility (extensions like 1Password, ad blocking lists, etc.), and what’s left — maybe 10% — goes to community support, discussions, and new features combined. That’s why our changelogs look active but long-standing issues persist: we’re constantly triaging a backlog with thousands of entries and making painful priority calls every single day.
None of this is meant as an excuse. You’re right that stability matters, and the issues you describe are real. But this is the cost of building a genuine alternative to the browser market rather than shipping another Chromium or Gecko wrapper. We think that trade-off is worth it for users who want real engine diversity and full extension support without Google’s or Mozilla’s constraints.
That said, we can’t do it alone — that’s exactly why Orion+ exists. If you believe in what we’re building, subscribing is the most direct way to help us grow the team and get to that “Snow Leopard” moment faster.
We’re sorry for the rough edges. We know they’re there, and we’re working on it.
No problem directly downloading from the source (arguably better cuz I can keep the installer) but is there a reason Apple isnt allowing Orion on the AppStore or was that a choice on Kagi's part?
I can't find it in the downloads.
Poor little Google doesn't have the resources to support mv2.
I bet they ain’t found shit, or even looked. There was a time I would read that charitably because it was Google, but that time has long passed. That reads like a lie to justify their actions.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.
If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.
The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.
https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
If I manually close it no issue.
I also do not, and have never, experienced this. I've been using Pixel phones since the 3a in 2019/2020.
I'm still going to use Firefox, I just hope the battery issue I experience goes away.
yeah I love Firefox - but it takes a lot of memory + drains battery faster
on Android phone tried many, most recently was using Kiwi Browser, then for some time Firefox until they fucked up UI, so moved to Cromite, though my phone broke (never buy Google Pixel again, first broken phone after 15 years with smartphones and various brands including very low budget), so now I am on my old phone which for some reason doesn't support Cromite, so I am back at Firefox temporarily
Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.
EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.
Speaking personally I have used Firefox pretty much exclusively for 20+ years, always on low-end hardware. It's been years since I last had any performance issues.
I don't even think its about number of tabs. Just yesterday and today, Mullvad browser takes minutes to load a set of about 7 pinned tabs (with no other tabs) on startup, whereas Helium (which is based on Chromium) loads in a second or two close to a hundred tabs.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin, but since its appearance it's basically solved the ad blocking on Firefox and became the de-facto standard for the browser.
You probably lost all your users to it, rather that they all stopped using FF.
Most likely AdBlock Plus. It was basically the standard until they started allowing advertisers to pay to not have their ads blocked.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
Their tech stack is heavily JavaScript-focused, as their entire UI is written in JavaScript.
As a counter example, Brave is heavily invested in C++ and Rust, and I believe they could handle that work much better.
Even if they don't want to handle it directly, this is the kind of thing a single sponsor can pay Igalia for, who have shown the ability to make entire new Chromium subsystems like MathML. There is no shortage of C++ browser developers in the world to do maintenance work.
Right now The ad companies have not really figured this out and DoH largely works like port 53 DNS did. But give it a few years. They will up their game and our ability to mitm our own dns queries will vanish. I will miss it.
And you can definitely mitm a non-configurable DoH resolver if you absolutely needed to do that, as long as you can add your own trusted CA on a device.
The attack vector that DoH offers is that data exfiltration companies will start shipping their own DNS resolver in javascript to work around DNS-based filtering. They can't do this with regular DNS because the network traffic can still be observed and blocked independently, but how will you block a browser from accessing specific https URLs without MITM'ing all traffic?
So yes, DoH does have something to do with DNS choice: it can completely subvert the OS-provided domain resolver service as well as the browser-configured one.
I'm very confused by this comment.
There's no such thing in the Google realm
In what way? I've never noticed a difference.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
Just keep making a browser that isn’t shit. That’s your only job!
Perhaps good was overkill. Less bad?
Here is the guy who builds the browser I use https://www.stoutner.com/about/
git https://gitweb.stoutner.com/?p=PrivacyBrowserAndroid.git;a=s...
download https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-android/changelog/
One time setup, it’s synced to Mozilla account for later reinstalls
> https://about.google/company-info/philosophy/
> 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil.
Their sunsetting of manifest v2 appears fast to me and updating some corporate philosophy has apparently no business impact.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil
implies that they're doing it for fun then I guess?
I doubt I missed anything of significant substance, but didn't want to assert factual knowledge, so I just linked the Wikipedia article (which I also didn't read into). Don't interpret my skipping the rumination step with excusing or dismissing Google's decline. I don't need to rubber-neck every step of a slow-mo, multi-year train wreck to lament that it happened and update my priors regarding Google.
You can but well, it's more profitable the other way around....
Neat! I rate this sentence at 7/10 on my scale of shit American companies say. The top score is currently held by Palantir with their X bio "Software that dominates."
1. Stop asking pesky questions.
2. Add Gemini buttons into everything.
3. If problems, see 1.This meant they added to Blink all the Gecko features uBlock Origin used?[1] Or they said they could maintain MV2 after Google removed it fully? Or they supported it so far?
They said We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible. But other developers said this and meant they would support MV2 until Google removed it.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
And then there's still Firefox and all of its forks.
Best of luck to Big Tech as people will move on elsewhere.
I'm tired of all the (mostly technical) people whining that they need Chrome, and only Chrome can browse the internet. Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work and conveniently "it was some time back and I don't remember the details".
I've been using FF since before it was called Firefox. In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox - online shopping, social media, banking, custom line-of-business internal apps, ERP apps... you name it.
And, TBH, if I did, I'd just visit that one site with Chrome, and still use FF daily.
I used FireFox for the same reasons, for years. Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.
I kept reading posts about how the FireFox team was increasing performance, yet it never seemed to really impact it. Maybe because I often have several windows with a dozen tabs each (yes, one of those people.)
These days I have given up, and I haven't tried it for about two years now, maybe more. Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?
It still lives on the Dock, next to Safari and Chrome. I can't bear to remove the icon.
And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy. At this point, I'd pay for a non-Chromium, highly performant, privacy-first browser.
Are you opening "several windows with a dozen tabs each" in Chrome? If not, then it's hardly a fair comparison.
Well, with unblockable ads coming to Chrome, that will no longer be true.
There is no world in which browsing on Chrome with ads is faster than browsing on Firefox without ads.
> Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?
Well, since moving from ads to no-ads results in roughly a 30% performance increase, you can expect Firefox with uBlock origin to beat out anything in Chrome.
> And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy.
Agreed.
You've been arguing strongly (condescendingly, really) against people making (what you see as) uneducated claims about Firefox. Yet there you are, doing the same with Chrome.
I have. The dominos pizza website (at least in Ireland) basically never works with Firefox. I normally end up using Safari for that particular site.
Additionally, lots of stuff doesn't work when Advanced Tracking Protection is on, enough that if I have any issues my first step is disabling that.
Sounds more like a feature than a bug /s
It simply does not work well on a lot of sites including government or bank websites. Wish it did.
Do you have any other websites that don't work?
A lot of web devs simply do not test on anything else, even for billion and trillion dollar companies, I've seen it first hand.
This includes a lot of state and federal government websites.
Note: I have said nothing about nebula, I don't even know what that is if it's not the network overlay.
You do realize that people have stuff to do and want their browser to be both 1) fast and 2) compatible with all websites?
Firefox is slower than Chromium, and always will have some compatibility issues, because all websites are made with Chromium in mind.
You can pretend all you want that "well ackshually standards exist and all website makers should use things from the standard", but it's not realistic, everyone will just stick with what works on Chromium.
Also projects like Ungoogled Chromium exist, but for some reason Firefox fanboys conveniently ignore them and pretend that all Chromium-based browsers are evil and Firefox is our last bastion of hope (it isn't and also it sucks)
Manifest V3 doesn't prevent anyone from blocking ads, as proven by uBO Lite. And yet misinformation about MV3 takes place in every Chromium vs Firefox debate.
IME, ads introduce a 30% or more performance penalty, the only way Chrome is "faster" is if you view ads on FF.
So, sure, if you don't want to block ads, Chrome just might be slightly faster. But the browser that never fetches ads in the first place is always going to be faster.
Firefox with uBlock origin is basically as fast as a web browser can get.
Move your ad blocking to a different layer. Like say, network level.
What was not an intended use case for an ad blocker in your opinion? To block ads in video? Why?
And to be honest FF is working fine for me, haven't run into anything too slow to my taste so far.
These are very different experiences we have. I've been using FF on Linux and on Windows since before the first day I found Youtube, and have not yet had a period where it doesn't work.
It's not pretending when tens of thousands are browsing that self-same site just fine over the period you had problems.
I've used Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Slackware and more. In none of them did I need to do anything specific to make FF work on youtube.
What am I doing wrong? All the games I want to play just seem to work without issue, including new AAA titles, with exceptions for things that use kernel level anticheat that I wouldn't play anyway specifically because of that.
Arc Raiders, Helldivers 2, Factorio, etc just fine. I'm even involved in some alpha / beta testing for a couple of new games.
Just running fedora + proton (wine). I just use the regular steam client like anyone else.
- Chrome is safer due to the proper sandboxing of tabs.
- Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable. None of the is/browser settings work. Yeah, I realise YouTube is owned by Google
That's just my first two (just look it up, don't take my word for it), to show your "whining" claim is just an uneducated hostility not bound in facts.
I'm literally watching Lowko videos right now, on a computer made in maybe 2010, running Linux Mint and FF.
If you'd look it up you could see its not a single person problem, it's seemingly random.
Unsure if its a Firefox bug, Google pushing nonsense or uBlock Origin but constantly the YouTube UI Lags, video playback buffers, freeze, etc. Some days its near unuseable on Firefox, but I push through.
That's fully on Google. I use plenty of other streaming sites where Firefox handles full-screen video just fine. Coming from the web search company that penalizes the rest of the Internet for slow-loading pages, Youtube is basically an embarrassment and I'm convinced this is completely intentional.
It's gotten so bad that I don't even try to watch Youtube in-browser any more; when someone posts a link that I think might be worth the effort, it goes straight into youtube-dl and I'll watch it offline or not at all.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
Anyone tried that?
Cmon, it's in the article.
"could soon" is meaningless
Yes they disabled the extension at one point if you had it installed, but it was 2 clicks to re-enable it. The edge extension store shows 14m active edge ublock origin users.
(Cheeky phrasing, of course this is an anecdote. But for anyone the news is relevant to, definitely recommend a try!)
Any other browser with uBlock Origin: Chrome is dead.
That said, selector based ad-blocking is still supported in MV3. So might be possible to get most of the functionality with both a MITM-level blocker and an MV3 selector based blocker.
That change came after Google's changes around MV3 were released. I actively campaign against using Google anything at my job as well.
You know what else is a security concern? Ads. The amount of mental gymnastics is insane. It's honestly insulting.
Unfortunately sometimes my Intel Arc B580 has a driver quirk where all the windows freeze and unlike Chromium based browsers I can't open Task Manager and kill the GPU Process and have it restart and have everything keep working, but rather have to kill the whole browser and restart it and hope the tabs load back correctly - thankfully haven't had many issues with losing those (only once or twice in the past year, but those were fucking annoying).
Either way, I explored both Edge as my daily driver for a year or so and also Safari on my Mac - both are actually fine as far as the user experience is concerned, but in the end I still come back to Firefox. It's a browser, it doesn't feel user hostile, it does its job well enough. Also personally I like its devtools more.
People just like to rage against Google.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
It's even available on iOS, I have it running in Safari
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Therefore uBOL experience is practically the same. I haven't seen a single ads in months of browsing.
Only need Firefox ESR for a handful of websites giving me no option when specifying a Linux/Mozilla user agent instead of the native one for those doesn't work.
This change is good for the majority of users, but is actually bad for large enterprise customers and highly-regulated customers. It puts more control and onus of responsibility on to Google, rather than the end-user. So, we will expect to see better enforcement of controls from Google for the lowest-hanging-fruit that some aspects of MV2 exposed.
What's that, you say? MV2 changes? Well there's 3 things.
1. Remote code execution. The ability for someone to just yeet commands into your browser. A little harder to do directly.. Still very possible, just with extra steps.
2. Removing the ability for extensions to access network requests directly, which is what adblockers often relied on. It also means malicious extensions could snoop on your requests. They still can, just with extra steps.
3. Background persistence, an extension could stay alive, maintain state, run timers, keep connections open, and coordinate across tabs. So this shuts off the "background persistence" piece -- but helps with ensuring better isolation. Still possible, but now requires yeeting your data to an external provider instead of keeping the state contained locally.
Those 3 changes are incredibly powerful, and will impact many, many Enterprise security tools. Tools that now instead will result in products like "Island Browser", and "Enterprise Chrome" being rolled out to supplement the functionality that MV2 gave us.
This change goes against the US and Australian government's hardening advice, and reduces the overall efficacy of security controls we're able to implement within our web browsers natively.
CISA's own guidance on this is pretty straightforward (aptly named Securing Web Browsers and Defending Against Malvertising for Federal Agencies): https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/CISA%20CEG%...
Here's the Australian Government's control relating to it:
> Control: ISM-1485; Revision: 1; Updated: Sep-21; Applicable: NC, OS, P, S, TS; Essential 8: ML1, ML2, ML3 > Web browsers do not process web advertisements from the internet.
And if you're wondering about what incentives there are that led to this change, you can read this letter written to the Chairman of the FTC by a US Senator back in 2020. This letter is linked to from the same CISA document I shared earlier.
You should read it in full, and consider what incentives the Senator was referring to -- and how they also apply in this scenario.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/011420%20Wyden%20...
Those Enterprise Chrome products I mentioned earlier? Chrome's change has now put some of this functionality which was previously possible with an extension, behind the Enterprise Chrome Premium SKU: https://chromeenterprise.google/products/chrome-enterprise-p...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472424
[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
smiling smugly from planet firefox
So much for blocking at network level.
As a developer I've often built "inferior" versions of products for specific user groups. The product worked perfectly for those users, they saw no difference. Yet, when asked, I'd maintain that it's inferior because <technical reasons>. And you know what? We are both right.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Consider manifest v3 has a fixed block list that can only be updated with the extension and only with permission of the browser.
Sadly I don't think that's the general case, I've been on FF for decades but there isn't a universe where I use a browser without UBO at this point.
One wouldn't need to be loyal to UBO... a simple with-and-without comparison would be enough for anyone with a functioning brainstem.
Especially since they put no effort into removing even extensions they know are malicious (and who work very well within the MV3 restrictions): https://palant.info/2025/01/20/malicious-extensions-circumve...