Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

9to5google.com

291 pointsspeckx380 comments

Recent and related:

Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 - June 2026 (450 comments)

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And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.

Hear, hear!

Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks.

My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.

white hat firefox, black hat brave?

Why brave black hat?

>I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else

Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.

I thought that brave was caught injecting affiliate links. That alone makes it worse than anything mozilla has done.

Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...

ill be in the strong minority here, and it should be opt-in, but if theres no affiliate link, i would be ok with my tiny marketshare browser capturing the extra. less ethical for them to be replacing other peoples affiliate links, but they are also blocking ads ... so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.

What I don't understand is how inserting affiliate links doesn't violate affiliate ToS.

I would much rather just pay the browser maker directly rather than it subtly doing strange things without letting me know.

> so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.

Ads are hardly an example of an ethical product to begin with, hah.

two wrongs?

"Direct match" can be disabled

It's URL prefixing

Vivaldi claims they don't collect data from "Direct Match"

No way to verify this claim is true but that's beside the point. It's another web browser sending traffic to it's own servers

Vivaldi is Chromium-based

This week an "I'm quitting" blog post from a former Mozilla employee was on the HN front page. He more or less recommended Vivaldi, i.e., Chromium

The problem of advertising is not solved by choice of browser vendor where _all_ the vendors are trying to make money from ad services, partnerships with Google, affiliate marketing, cryptocurrency, etc.

"Not as bad as Chrome" is a pathetically low bar to meet

These browsers take longer to compile than an operating system. Absurd complexity and vulnerability

The Vivaldi default settings are just as bad as any other so-called "modern" browser, i.e., they have to be changed

It's a fool's errand to compare these browsers to each other. They have far more similarities than differences. They all suck

Those 2 browsers used a rendering engine developed by Google. It would not be wrong to consider them partial chromium reskins with all the technical dependency it entails.

They're built on Chromium, they still reinforce the Chromium monoculture and expand Google's influence.

And there's LibreWolf, for people who want to use Firefox without Mozilla.

I prefer ungoogled-chromium: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

How does it helps with this issue? It becomes a much bigger fork if they keep the manifest support.

It was less related to the manifest issue specifically and more that I don’t think Mozilla is some great bastion of internet freedom, and chromium works better on many sites because developers design for it because it’s the most popular browser.

that doesnt get your ublock orign after this.

If that’s true it may be what finally pushes me back to Firefox.

Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Saying "you can use uBlock Origin instead of uBlock Origin Lite!" won't change this.

As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox.

Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".

Agree.

I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.

They recently added web serial so here's hoping they might also do BT and USB.

I'll be right there with you. Even with the stupid addition of widgets which immediately get disabled and never used.

All that I care about is that I do not see a single ad in or on anything while I browse. It's a fight but firefox makes it doable.

You won't be the only person using it. I'll be right there with you.

I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default.

It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.

It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.

What does it matter for users if it's at 2% if it works better than the alternatives?

Lots of products and services have small market share and are better than the market leaders.

The great thing about FOSS is that nobody can stop me using it, and nobody can force you to use it. We can all be happy.

The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)

> Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%.

Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%.

If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort.

We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.

That was with a lot of technical innovation against a static competitor. Firefox isn't in nearly as good of a position when it comes to either technology or resources now.

It would be possible for a surge in contributors to bring it back up to a double digit percentage, but I don't think manifest v3 is going to be the catalyst for that.

Apple market share (whether by hardware or operating system) was that low for awhile there and by some estimates OSX even dipped down to 2.29%:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/

And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?

Apple did lose the desktop OS war. But that became less important on the desktop itself because of the browser ;) and also mobile, which is btw where the largest competitor to Chromium exists. It was still important though. Windows is huge leverage in all sorts of B2B areas like Azure.

I don’t care about its market share. Most people are tech illiterate. This comes as no surprise.

It depends a bit on the market. Firefox still has 15% desktop market share in Germany, only at second place after Chrome.

How much does it actually matter that Firefox uses a different engine from Chromium? I would imagine you can just use a fork of Chromium that supports uBO or whatever else Google dislikes, and there are already browsers like that. Maybe cause Google could move Chrome to closed-source so the others gradually get outdated?

I prefer an ad (and porn, gambling, social media) blocking host file myself.

Necessary, but not sufficient. Sometimes you want to block certain URLs and not whole domains.

Or certain elements.

Many browsers and programs now days ignore HOSTs.

A lot of sites serve their ads from the same domains as their actual content nowadays.

So if you really don't want to ever see ads again, you need something at the application layer.

"A lot of sites serve their ads from the same domains as their actual content nowadays."

What are some examples

I observe the contrary among the sites submitted to HN

Without access to other subdomains and other domains plus a Javascript interpreter, the ads and tracking don't work

Google's sponsored results, ads from streaming services.

Usually when the website is not part of an ad network, but instead runs their own ads.

How many streaming services

Are these "sites" as in "websites"

Or something more akin to Netflix, endpoints accessed with an "app" on a "TV"

The parent comment's HOSTS file method will fall short, for sure

But a zone file that functions as an "allowlist", cf. "blocklist", can do the job in most cases

If the ads are in the video file then downloading makes more sense than streaming

Ads can be removed from the file, or skipped in the video player

I use Safari, and it’s good.

No ublock origin so it is less good.

Agreed, however Wipr seems about as good in practice.

I use 1blocker (desktop+mobile) with Little Snitch (desktop only). I’m OK.

Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team.

A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.

This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives.

They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.

1.6% is insane though. That would be like Google, Apple, or MSFT paying their CEO $4-6 billion a year.

Which is why it's not normal or standard to represent pay that way. The whole reason for it in this context is to address claims that people keep making over and over that they ran out of money to develop the browser because they gave it all to the CEO.

The problem is, the market price for executive leadership doesn't care about that, there is always a floor at the bottom that will make leadership compensation consume much more % of the budget of a smaller org than something the size of Google.

Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.

Except it's nothing like that, because the numbers are so different.

Well, I'm certainly glad that Google has never given their executives a lot of compensation or done layoffs of their workers.

I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends.

Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox

I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.

Most computer users have very few real demands to make and it suffices.

> I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly

The overwhelmingly vast majority of the world population uses Google Chrome with no adblocker, on Windows, and have no desire to change anything. Even if you actively try to persuade them towards other browsers or operating systems.

Why is that difficult to understand? Most people are not technical and do not have the same concerns or gripes as we do... their current software stack is familiar and does what they need it to, and that's all they care about.

For what it is worth they have now added a global kill switch for AI features. Though I appreciate the local translation feature so I'm inclined to keep it on just for that.

If you don't mind me asking, do Waterfox and Librewolf add significant benefits that you wouldn't get by customizing base Firefox?

IMHO the only forks that actually add something meaningful are Floorp and Zen. I personally stick with Firefox with some user.js tweaks. Projects like Celenity's Phoenix shows that most forks are not necessary and you need to trust another party.

What other software have you stopped using because they added an optional feature you didn't use?

Even before the AI stuff, Firefox was showing sponsored links on my new tab window by default. It's not enough to make me switch, but not a good first impression if I were new to it.

There is a reason Mozilla is getting ripped to shreds.

I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support.

And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.

There's a reason Brave sucks too. From dabbling into cryptocurrency to charging $60 for Brave origins, it's also a dubious proposal.

Edit: Someone on Reddit compiled a list of various fuckups. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...

Of the no-hassle browsers (read: widely support, no snags) it is still the most private browser you can run. It blows Firefox out of the water on adblocking and its adblocking itself doesn't rely on Manifest so it isn't hit by Google's changes.

This is an unadvisable forest-v-trees calculation. At any given time, Firefox is rarely the "best" at any snapshot metric.

It's nonetheless the thing you can overwhelmingly trust the most in the long run.

You mean the same Brave that's only going to offer "limited MV2 support" for five hand chosen extensions because they aren't able of truly keeping it alive? https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/#which-mv2-...

Anything Chromium based is tainted. They will not be able to keep out all of Google's shitty decisions because they are not building a browser, they are building a skin on top of somebody else's browser.

Brave seems silly theoretically for two reasons:

1) I think it's well established (or perhaps not well established enough) that "non-profit" is the only way to go for base level computing things like this. Profit motive (as distinguishable from "keep the lights on money," e.g. with Wikipedia) makes you do unnecessary and often harmful experimentation.

2) It's a fork of the thing you're trying to beat. Now, that may not be a deal-killer, but given Chrome's dominance, getting outside of that entirely seems smarter.

I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/ I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)

I really want to like zen but every so often it eats all my RAM. Many have reported similar issues.

https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/8932

Thanks for sharing! Fortunately have not ran into this yet but obviously YMMV.

Why does their website seem like a clone of Anthropic's?

I've been using Zen since almost the beginning of the project. I'm pretty happy with it! Great QOL features, and being Firefox, I have perfect ad block and syncs nicely with Firefox for Android.

Well, you see Firefox isn't entirely perfect, so I'll just continue using the worst web browser out there until someone finally makes the perfect one...

The worst one being Chrome or its Microslop copycat?

Internet Explorer 6

>Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed,

Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude.

Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing.

>That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars

And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now?

They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.

Once again I have to let people know about glide[0], fork of Firefox. I know a lot of people here like keyboard-driven and scriptable software, and glide shines at both. Keyboard control in it is so so much better than the extensions for Chrome or Firefox, and I'm quite happy how easily the API allows me do my own customizations. (as an example when I open HN in new tab with my bind ,sn , if I already have HN front page open it will refresh it, focus it and move it to the tab index where new tab would otherwise have opened. Really simple stuff in glide, not so much in others)

[0[ https://github.com/glide-browser/glide

This seems like a nice project, I tried it out. Scroll is so much smoother than vimium. Sadly, it doesn't seem ready for daily use yet:

1. Hint detection seems much more fragile than vimimium. For example, some links don't get a hint when pressing f on their own :tutor page.

2. The ctrl+, shortcut to focus doesn't work always, requiring a mouse click to start working again.

3. Pressing tab doesn't autocomplete in command mode.

And some other minor quirks.

"Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive."

That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases

People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive"

If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla

If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows

Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google

By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive

But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open"

Except they will not mention the money from Google part

Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist"

This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads

I'll never understand the "I hate FF for taking google money. That's why I use chrome." When something is so egregious incongruous then it should be a red flag.

You're hallucinating the second part. The comment you replied to doesn't advocate for the use of Chrome.

That's a lot of words to leave me completely unconvinced that Chrome is better than Firefox for an open www.

The nice thing about using Firefox is that Zen is by far the best browser I have ever used. So you get all the pros of Firefox in an amazing package.

> Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website.

Firefox is more divisive than AI?

Safari on Mac, Firefox on Linux. (Windows: no thanks)

You mean the organization that advocated for deplatforming and more: https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need...

Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives.

Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking.

Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.

And sadly, Firefox on iOS is the only browser that doesn't have a the possibility to run an Adblocker. Safari can run uBlock Origin. Brave had one built-in. Hell, even Edge has Adblock Plus.

Does Mozilla have a contract with Google to not build one in as part of the search contract?

Firefox on Android supports ublock, not sure why it wouldn't support it on iOS

It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. Firefox on iOS is just a skinned version of WebKit/Safari. See 2.5.6:

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...

> It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS.

That's incorrect, and Firefox doesn't blame Apple for this. Many 3rd-party iOS browsers do ad blocking natively and/or via extensions. https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/ios

This is not the cause though - other third-party browsers on iOS can do ad-blocking, and also can use system-installed extensions.

They could also launch an alternative browser engine for iOS and iPadOS in the EU.

> Firefox on iOS is just a skinned version of WebKit/Safari

So are Chrome, Brave, and Edge. And yet, they support ad-blocking extensions (and so does Safari).

They allow extensions on the Android version. But yeah, on iOS I had to switch to Orion. It seems FF for iOS doesn’t get much attention.

What?

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/mobile/focus/

The only thing I use Firefox on iOS for *is* its ad blocker.

I use it on iOS daily and there’s no ad blocker. The page you linked only mentions tracking blocking. If you actually have ad blocking enabled, I’m sure a lot of us would love to hear how you did it.

Mozilla advertised Firefox Focus to block tracking and ads before. And it blocks some ads.[1] It is not possible to block tracking effectively without blocking some ads at least. They could have stopped to advertise ad blocking because people who wanted ad blocking wanted better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557156

It was originally pitched as a "distraction blocker" and it works in two modes. As a browser and as a content blocker, if you enable it in Safari's extension settings. I've still got it set up as a content blocking Safari extension (you find that in Settings -> Apps -> Safari -> Extensions) and it still seems to be blocking ads for me. Maybe not as many as it once did, but I just turned it off to see, and that made an unpleasant difference.

I think I've been using it for 10 years (or so) now. It's my favorite thing Mozilla has done on iOS.

This links to “Firefox Focus” which is different in the iOS App Store than “Firefox”. I had no idea.

This Firefox Focus on iOS does effectively block adds on a recipe site unlike plain Firefox. I just did a cursory head to head test on the same recipe site url.

Thank you for sharing this!

Focus does not sync with Firefox desktop, and the sync part is the reason I want to use the SAME one on desktop and mobile.

> iOS

If free computing and user control are a priority for you, consider switching to GrapheneOS. You get better security than iOS, a UI/UX that does not assume you are mildly retarded, and full freedom to run any program from any source, including IronFox (a hardened Firefox fork).

As you alluded to, many Chromium forks (notable exception is Ungoogled) are backed by tech companies. There's already plenty of intentional changes they maintain in their forks, like Privacy Sandbox,[0] so I don't think preserving support for v2 is a large hurdle for them.

[0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...

Google described Manifest V2 as significant tech debt with new bugs still found there. Either they are lying or it's a non-trivial feature set to continue to support.

So will be interesting to see how many other browsers actually do keep this support alive.

A trillion dollar company? Lying? That's beyond the pale. Google has never done anything against my interests. They're always sooooooo honest in their communications.

oh, you sweet summer child

"Backed by tech companies"

Yup, huge red flag. Non-profit is the long-term way to go.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, but people still find creative ways to crap all over them for some reason.

Someone else in this thread said they were "supporting the closed internet" by sending search queries to Google.

Yup, this kind of criticism happens all the time. It's good to point out -- but a lot of people treat it like a deal-killer, which is the height of naivete.

Brave has an interesting approach where they have added core support for four key MV2 extensions to the core of the browser engine, bypassing MV3 entirely.

> Update: As of v1.81, we host the following Manifest V2 (MV2) extensions on Brave’s backend: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript. These extensions operate independently from the equivalent versions that are currently present on the Chrome Web Store, and have to be downloaded separately. Users can download and enable these 4 extensions from the brave://settings/extensions/v2 page.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

I just don’t see this being sustainable long term when you’re upstream is doing everything they can to sabotage you. This is a huge maintenance burden for Brave and eventually there might be a breaking change introduced by Google that just makes this approach no longer tenable.

Mozilla is extremely friendly to content blockers, and does everything they can to make sure they are well supported as first class citizens.

How is Google doing "everything they can to sabotage you"? MV2's deprecation timeline was set in 2021, slipping further repeatedly. This is after they had already started the plan in 2018. It's been nearly a decade.

Boiling you slowly still means they're boiling you.

They don't boil you fast, because they can't: you would balk at that.

In other words, taken together, they do all they can to boil you on that issue and kill ad-blockers.

I feel like you can justify literally anything as "doing everything they can" if "they did it fast" and "they did it over the course of a decade, replaced the API, the API still supports ad blockers, etc" are treated the same way.

Hmm I don't know about sustainable long term. Maybe with LLMs the burden of rebasing and porting the needed patches to keep it working across versions would make the task fairly sustainable vs no LLM usage.

That being said, agree that this is a horrible move and we are paying the consequences of it due to the huge market Chromium-browsers occupy. I'm a Firefox user as well, but it is really slow in adopting latest web features and I won't hold my breath for a shiny future, in regards Mozilla. Maybe there is a shiny future, maybe there is not.

At family gatherings, in their computers, it's all Google Chrome. No adblocks whatsoever. They got "used to" seeing ads everywhere. I personally can't. Web is literally unusable for me without it. I try my best to install adblocks in their devices. Most of the time, making them use Firefox is out of the question, as they are tied and "used to" Chrome profile sync and don't want to log in their pages once again, etc. My mom got me luckily, and I got her Brave with all branding, sponsored and crypto non-sense disabled. Otherwise, she's the perfect target for incorrectly clicking through a sponsored post in a google search, or similar popups and stuff in other websites, resulting in deceive behavior.

This is the worst of it, actually. It's not just "commercial ads". Sometimes, it's just deceiving behavior, manipulating people's opinions, and making them feel in a particular way to do god knows what.

WebKit being forced down to iOS user's throat is also that should not happen, but we as society for consented to it. We can say that this is the only thing holding Chromium to become pure havok. Although ublock is available there, is it in their "lite" format, same as Chromium. So, not the full uBlock that we should be getting...

There's also a part where we should blame ourselves as culture for letting all these things to slide without doing anything for it. Microsoft got sued by the US in 2001 for an antitrust case for leveraging Internet Explorer through their Windows monopoly in PC market. We have it so much worse today, and no one seems to bat an eye. I know things are far more complex compared to the past, but hey, due to it, we should have more strict systems in place to prevent these anti-people behavior.

Ladybird is a welcome addition to the scene. Hopefully something beautiful comes out of them in the next couple of years.

I think maintaining the MV2 paths would be a huge maintenance burden, but this approach, being scoped to only four plugins that are widely used, seems to be much more tractable. I'd put on about the same level of effort as maintaining their own ad blocking engine.

The extensions are in addition to their own included ad and other nuisance blocking features. I've been testing migrating from Firefox to Brave Origin (the paid fork with no crypto features that has a free linux build) and it works pretty well without any extensions.

Yesterday I wanted to get a brave search api key on the free tier and they require a credit card even for that. That pissed me off a bit but still gonna test the browser a little bit more. Firefox is really pissing me off and I don't want to keep using it forever just because there is no other browser engine. Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable.

I used brave a bit and really liked it.

But its obvious that these guys are semi shady and they will show sooner or later. I liked chrome derviates and used them over a decade. I got tired of feeling forced to switch after vivaldi/brave so I went the firefox way last year.

The circle is completed.

how are they obviously semi shady? whats shady about brave?

https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what_s_up_with_lobste_rs_blocking...

yea this is bad, i had kinda forgotten about this https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45#issue...

i dont know, firefox is very buggy and unstable, crashes or just log me out of everything every few weeks, we dont really have great choices, wishful thinking, but i hope brave straightened up

Yuck! I'd heard of these but I am always like "it IS open source". But so is Mozilla. I actually did test a build of Ladybird. The sites I looked at (without login or anything) basically all work fine but they are VERY slow. This is understandable. Performance is not their priority right now. It is coming along fine though.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-...

What bothers me about Brave is that, although it is "open source," in practice using Brave means running binaries distributed by Brave Software (a for-profit, VC-backed adtech company). As far as I know, no independent builds are yet part of a mainstream Linux distro, and the project calls forks "freeriding." The browser may be OK, but all of this does not inspire a lot of confidence.

The complexity here is definitely a point against Brave.

We can use helium. It works fine.

Chromium-based, so it's a non-starter. If you care about the open web, you shouldn't use anything related to Chromium.

I see a lot of people saying that Firefox is not as good as Chrome. Do you have any examples of things Chrome does that Firefox doesn't? Genuinely curious, I have been alternating between Chrome and Firefox for the past two decades and last time I switched back to Firefox was 2 years ago, and I haven't had any performance/compability/feature concerns at all. (Full disclosure I use Zen, not vanilla Firefox)

Two things that I noticed: - Firefox did crash on me more frequently. It wasn't a daily, or even a weekly thing, but it was more of a problem. - Firefox limits how small I can shrink my tabs in the tab bar. Chrome also has a limit, but it is much less restrictive.

That last one was the killer difference for me. Firefox wants me to be able to see (at least part of) the title of each tab, even if that means I can't see all my tabs at once. I want to see all of my tabs at once, and I don't care if I can see the title - the favicon is enough.

I did try configuring Firefox to let me shrink the tabs more, and even tried messing with its GTK configuration, but no luck.

So I do feel a bit bad for using Brave instead of Firefox, but after months of dealing with Firefox's UI I lost patience.

> - Firefox limits how small I can shrink my tabs in the tab bar.

This can be changed via chrome/userChrome.css.

Mine is:

  @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
  
  .tabbrowser-tab {
    min-width: 3em !important;
    clip-width: 3em !important;
    
  }
  
  [uidensity="compact"]:root {
    --tab-min-height: 30px !important;
    --newtab-margin: -3px 0 -3px -3px !important;
  }
  
  .tabbrowser-tab {
    max-height: var(--tab-min-height) !important;
  }
  
  .tabs-newtab-button{
    margin: var(--newtab-margin) !important;
  }

I don't remember if that exactly is line-for-line what I did, but I was at least doing something similar, and not having success.

Try vertical tabs. I fell in love since I've been using it daily. Zen has a special flavor of vertical tabs where pinned tabs open links in a modal, which I now can't do without, and can be reset to the original url with a middle click. I use that all the time for HN, mail, youtube, claude, etc. I believe Waterfox also has a neat implementation of vertical tabs as smart trees.

I really don't like the idea of vertical tabs, but given how so many web pages these days work, I should probably give them a try. That said, the tree-based approach is fascinating - points to Zen (and related efforts) for trying such a different paradigm for arranging tabs.

Web USB and Web NFC immediately come to my mind, it took ages until they at least implemented Web Serial in Firefox a few weeks ago.

And the devtools are nowhere near comparable to Chrome's, although I admit this might be a matter of personal experience.

Firefox leaks memory. When I have it open for long time the memory usage will increase and even if I were to close all tabs & do memory minimization it will still use multiple gigabytes of memory.

While I cannot be sure, I assume that is the cause of the general slowdown I experience as well.

Restarting Firefox will fix free up the memory & fix the slowness. I do still use it as my primary browser despite these issues.

Is that on Windows? I use Linux and Mac and haven't had memory leaks. In fact, Chrome is more a problem for me on the Mac since my wife likes to keep Chrome windows open on her profile indefinitely, and Chrome keeps downloading updates on the background and takes a large chunk of my hard drive keeping every version that ever existed in the .App file.

Windows so maybe that is related.

Do note that I regularly have multiple browser windows open (and these are usually on private mode) with 50+ tabs so my usage pattern is not very standard.

I've just realised how infrequently I visit regular websites these days. Everything is trashed, popups, cookie requests, ads splattered everywhere.

I read some blogs that get linked from hn. I read some reddit subs. And I use LLMs for "search" and questions.

Whenever I do have to go back to the regular web it is horrible.

Someone ought to build a browser that is designed from the ground up to treat the web for what it is: the most hostile ecosystem on the planet.

uBlock/uMatrix functionality should be built into the core. Every domain and PSF should be sandboxed to its own profile. User agents and many js queries should return standard responses. Forcing display of video controls should be trivial. Manipulating pages to show/hide elements and customize feeds should be trivial. Right clicking to download any asset should just work.

And so, so much more.

The browser is my agent, not your mole.

Vivaldi (not affiliated) kinda aims to do this. At least they build the blocker in. It uses the Blink engine, too. I don't think this move by Google will adversely affect Vivaldi in the same way it does Chrome.

they aren't open source...

> The browser is my agent, not your mole.

Sorry, Google says no, and who are you to disagree?

Sarcasm aside: this what people who wax poetic about the market miss. In the 21st century, where products have "minds" of their own (software), they are developed to serve their manufactures first. The consumer is a distant second. And competition won't align the market with consumers, because all manufacturers have similar incentives (aka "enshittification").

This should be Firefox, but they've expended a lot of time and energy reimplementing code from Chromium instead of focusing on where they can add unique value.

One can hope that Ladybird will become that browser.

Also, not affiliated with Vivaldi. Just been loyally using them since the alpha bc they posted here about being The Real Opera’s Phoenix, aka its spiritual successor made by a band of Opera employees that Jerry McGuire’d. I watched the movie for the first time because of this browser.

They do built in Adblock that keeps up in the YT arms race. If they’re losing and I get an ad I restart the browser and we’re winning again.

It does lack elemental control of the DOM to manipulate pages on the user chrome, but dev tools is there. Though there are some CSS rendering options in a drop down like inverted colors and sepia and such. You can screenshot any page section with its screenshot tool.

Video controls can be shown on any image/video element with a right click.

Incredibly configurable. It offers email, RSS feeds, profiles. Exposed and granular user privacy controls in the settings window.

Its open image in new tab is pretty consistent, though some sites pull all the tricks and it’s just impossible to get the image (looking at you Reddit)

Their business model is a cookie swap on purchases made through their built in speed dial options. That doesn’t happen if you don’t click on them directly.

They could honestly stand to be fully transparent about that in the browser UI in the wake of Honey. I for one would love a popup that says “using this link sets us as the affiliate for this purchase. Thank you for supporting the development of your Vivaldi browser”

> speed dial options. That doesn’t happen if you don’t click on them directly.

It also seems to happen if you type the domain name in the address bar but hit enter when the suggested URL autofills. For me, typing out aliexpress.com fully will send me directly to AE, but typing aliexpress.c and hitting enter (with the autofill completing "om") redirects through vivaldi.com/bk/aliexpresscom-us

Helium has been the closest I've found. It comes with uBlock Origin. It is based on Chromium though, so not sure if the manifest v2 removal will break that.

I think the closest right now would be the Tor Browser.

I was experimenting a bit with this a few years ago. A way to easily see all the domains and connections and api’s every site you visit attempts. The UI is certainly complex, and most people don’t care.

Brave already does this. Built in ad Blocking

A lot of people have been very vocal about this. I use uBlock Origin Lite and haven't noticed a difference between it and uBlock Origin. Am I missing something?

Same. I'm still not seeing ads.

I've realized over time that people on the internet love finding things to be mad about, because raging against evil is fun. They'll make up an injustice if they can't find one today.

They’re not “making up an injustice.” Google is actively trying to stop ad blocking, this is a fact. You can argue whether or not it’s as severe as some people make it sound or whether people should be upset at all (I think we should be), but let’s not act like this was made up whole cloth.

I've seen some teams in YouTube try and stop ad blocking, but I haven't seen Google, or more importantly Chromium try and stop it.

1) YouTube is owned by Google and their entire revenue model is in alignment with how Google does things, which ublock origin interferes with.

2) Manifest v3 is Google’s, not YouTube’s, project.

Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blockers. In fact the chromium team worked together with ad block developers to adjust the design of Manifest v3 to better allow for them to be implemented.

Yeah chromium “helped” AdGuard specifically insofar as they agreed to restrictions. There’s a filter cap. It dilutes the efficacy of adblockers.

it's not nearly as complete: You only get filter list updates when the extension updates, there's no custom element picker, no per-site switches, no strict-site blocking, no dynamic filtering and you can't import block lists. It's better than nothing (which is pretty much unbearable IME) but not as good.

There is a custom element picker.

The filter updates without extension updates is possible in MV3 now too.

Origin Lite _can_ be beat by advertisers rotating the URLs they serve ads from. That doesn't mean advertisers are actively bypassing Lite, but they could

Yes, and this might take some years to catch on.

OTOH it's not out of the question that some open source non-extension Chrome mod emerges that will then block those kinds of ads. Brave is already shipping this anyway.

This can be mitigated by implementing real time updates of filter lists.

it's already implemented... in MV2.

MV3 specifically forbids remotely hosted 'code', which apparently filter lists are.

>which apparently filter lists are.

This is not true and chromium developers have stated that such configuration is not considered code.

+1, Lite is mostly fine. The main difference seems to be that YouTube videos sometimes start a couple seconds late. Not quite annoying enough yet to switch browsers (tbh though, Firefox is totally fine these days, main downside for me is that the WebGPU implementation lags quite a bit behind Chrome and Safari).

This is HN. The topic has been discussed so many times already. Please read the developer's post about it.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

Yup, unless you're really intense about blocking ads, uBlock Origin Lite is at worst a minor loss in quality most people wouldn't notice.

"Closing the door" on ad blockers is quite an exaggeration.

Hiding elements on the page should be the last goal. A lot of the traffic uBO-proper blocks, has nothing to do with what you see. "Ad blocker" is a lame name, it's not even the important part.

> For uBlock Origin users on Chrome, there’s uBlock Origin Lite. However, the Lite version “allows some tracking, its blocklist is a fraction of what the original blocked, and it can't perform the dynamic filtering that made the original effective,”

https://www.pcmag.com/news/googles-next-chrome-update-will-f...

I guess that's what the GP and I are both saying we didn't feel. I have no idea what benefit "dynamic filtering" provides. It sounds good on paper but having tried both versions, I can't tell the experiences apart. I don't see ads, pages load fast, and that seems like enough?

Actually, I'll take that back. I used to see far more stuff get blocked (e.g., when clicking links) than with Lite. Which is to say, Lite feels like it has fewer false positives.

When sites attempt to block users who use ad blocking extensions, dynamic filtering allows well written ad blockers to continue to work.

For instance:

> Last year, Google/YouTube ramped up its efforts against ad-blockers, preventing playback for users with the software installed on their devices, coercing them to disable it.

Users continued to exploit loopholes in browsers and third-party extensions, such as Firefox, that allowed them to bypass YouTube's ads while watching videos. However, the tech giant has seemingly doubled down on its efforts against ad-blockers, closing the few remaining loopholes

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/streaming-video...

Are there any URLs where you actually saw any difference?

Just because it's working today doesn't mean it will work as well in the future. It's not about the small technical change with deprecating mv2, it's about the direction they are taking Chrome.

I remember when they first announced it years ago and they pretended to care by walking back the change. As always, the strategy is to wait for the dust to settle and then push the changes again.

Well it got me to uninstall chrome so that’s something.

Google revealing how evil they really are.

That was always the plan with Chrome. Put B$ of engineering efforts into creating a nice browser and pushing people to switch over.

Once everyone is addicted and forgot about the competition, start to quietly make it more and more of a Spyware.

Chrome has always and will always be an attempt at controlling the client side of the funnel to be in charge of how much ads they can deliver to your brain. It's 100% a spyware with a side-effect of a browser.

Switch today. Firefox works well.

> That was always the plan with Chrome

No. The original plan for Chrome was to save money on "traffic acquisition cost" (The cash they give to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine) by moving users away those company's browsers.

Buuuuut, once Chrome turned out to dominate the browser market, the temptation to abuse that dominance was too much.

Just goes to show that no one with power can be relied on to self-regulate the use of that power. Power being any ability to nudge another human being toward actions that are not purely in their own self interest.

Googler, opinions are my own.

My understanding is they're doing this in the name of security, though it obviously has some benefit to ads. this policy more closely aligns with what Safari does today. And it prevents add-ons from scraping information since they have to put in the block list ahead of time.

I've been using manifest v3 version of Adblock and it's worked just fine for me. But obviously is not perfect, but it fell into more towards security and privacy of the user against malicious extensions.

Eh, Google controls the add-ons marketplace though. They control what add-ons are allowed, and they could even audit the add-ons for malicious code/behavior. Google, being a company that collects 75% of its revenue from ads, is being disingenuous by claiming this is a security-centered position. If security were the priority then the add-ons themselves should be inspected thoroughly, that much is obvious.

I primarily use Safari, and only switch to Chrome if a site misbehaves; every time I do so, I'm aghast by the ads and popups I suddenly get everywhere - despite having uBlock installed. I refuse to take that as an acceptable state of browsing the internet.

Safari has never supported MV2 uBlock Origin. Chrome with uBlock Lite is exactly the same as Safari with uBlock Lite.

In Safari, I use AdGuard and Consent-O-Matic, which catches pretty much everything.

Others in this thread disagree with you! But, if they're good enough for Safari, then you'll find they're exactly as good in Chrome.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker/b...

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdj...

Doesn't Chrome limit ad blockers to something like 30k rule each, and limit the number across all installed ad blockers to 330k, whereas Safari allows 150k rules per ad blocked and 900k across all installed ad blockers?

Blink 3 times if you're being held against your will, dude. "Trillion dollar advertising company neuters ad blocking because it wants to protect you" is some "I love Big Brother" stuff.

Aaah the beautiful inability to see what is so obvious because your salary depends on it.

Correct. They indeed do this in the name of security as announcing they do it for profit would probably be bad PR.

"We're doing it for your own good, pinky promise"

> they're doing this in the name of security

It is always in the name of security and good intentions.

Use Firefox. It's an excellent browser and needs your support.

Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering), and you dont have to take my word for it, a web search for something like 'firefox sluggish compared to chrome' will back this up too as I've tried switching multiple times but always end up back on a chromium variant because the firefox ui just doesn't feel like an upgrade.

Personally I've just given up trying with firefox and I now put up with brave - its certainly not perfect but at least the ad blocker isnt about to break.

Not using adware seems like a big upgrade to me.

Not in my experience. Never had issues with FF feeling sluggish at all.

Only place I feel it slow is on Google Meet and clickup.

Google Meet is definitely not going to perform better outside Chrome since based on recent web APIs proposed by Chrome (e.g. document PIP[0], element capture[1]), the Chrome team has shown they'll change the browser specifically to improve the UX of Google Meet.

[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/document-pict...

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/element-captu...

Almost as if it's on purpose

tiny bit slower, all things being equal, maybe. For one, who cares? No one can see tenth of a millisecond speed difference. Second, without a proper ad blocker, rendering speed is meaningless, because all the power will be used to render garbage you never wanted to see in the first place.

> a tiny bit slower

And that automatically disqualifies it? I find that wild. I've been using Firefox since it was at v2 I think, and never once considered switching for some speed gain. I actually use Vivaldi on the side sometimes for sites that aren't very Firefox-with-my-extensions-friendly, and find no difference in performance.

> Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering)

IIRC, it's got a much smaller memory footprint.

Let me know how fast the internet without working ad block feels...

(Personally I find Firefox is plenty fast! And the benefits vastly outweigh trying to deal with a Google-powered web browser.)

I dont need to, as I said I'm on brave, which isnt losing its adblocker.

> a tiny bit slower

This is no longer the case, at least not uniformly. My Speedometer 3.1 results are:

- Chromium: 30.0 (± 1.2)

- Firefox: 32.1 (± 1.6)

Using the latest browser version on Arch Linux.

I believe Firefox without ads is faster & safer than Chrome with Ads.

+1, I think (but may be wrong) this is because the firefox UI is non-native. This is especially visible on mac, it just reimplements everything on its own.

The UX aesthetically could use more polish, but agree it is an excellent browser replacement for Chrome.

You can user userChrome.css [1][2][3]

You can start with this page[4] for an examples of simple, but elegant styling.

And /r/FirefoxCSS can demonstrate all kinds of crazy options userChome.css enthusiasts can come up with.

[1] https://www.userchrome.org/

[2] https://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserChrome.css

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/wiki/index/tutorials

[4] https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html...

Firefox might need my support, but Mozilla does not.

So you can just use Firefox and turn off all the Mozilla-related junk you don't like. Best of both worlds.

If you look at the spending of the Mozilla Foundation they most certainly do not need our support they need to spend their resources on their browser instead of frivolities.

The support here is mindshare and evangelism, not monetary donations.

This is your sign to start using a DNS based ad/tracking blocker. Run it on your VPS with tailscale if you want it available everywhere without significant security overhead.

DNS adblocking doesn't catch everything.

Is it time to run every document we download through a sandboxed local LLM to clean it up on the fly? How long then before the ad tech companies start prompt injecting?

What a strange leap. There's rather a lot we can do to keep regular adblocking going and we don't have to just accept what Google deigns to give us. Wasting a bunch of GPU power to have an LLM hallucinate which parts of a page to delete hardly seems like a solution to me.

It was mostly an absurdist comment. I can squint and see this sort of thing coming though.

Bad headline. Popular ad blockers have already switched to MV3, and MV2 has already been disabled for all users.

Most would not consider MV3 versions as ”adblockers” anymore.

Yeah, I think calling the Mv3 versions "secure adblockers" would be more accurate.

Secure for whom?

Browser users. Pre Mv3 extensions were a huge vector for malware. My in-laws were hit by that.

You can write malicious MV3 extensions. The changes' stated reason was performance, not security.

How about "nerfed adblockers"? Do any of the MV3 versions replicate the full power of ublock origin on Firefox? (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...)

To keep with the current parlance, "safe adblocker" would seem to fit better. Safe for whom, I think we all already know.

I'm still not seeing any ads. Works fine for me.

Most (real world, not HN) users don't really notice any difference between MV2 and MV3 based extensions.

MV3 won't (and will not) block Youtube ads properly. There's the entire point of removing MV2.

Is that actually true? I've never looked into the API differences or how YouTube ads actually work, but I'm using a current Google Chrome version on MacOS, with uBlock Origin Lite and SponsorBlock, and I'm watching YouTube with no ads as far as I can tell (logged in, not subscribed to Premium). Is that supposed to be impossible now?

I just tested Chromium with uBlock Origin Lite (default settings, aka "Optimal") and had no issue blocking YouTube ads.

You say that like MV2 version didn't need extensive workarounds to block YT ads.

MV2 makes those workarounds possible in the first place, which MV3 doesn't.

It does.

Do they block ads though? I am now only using Firefox because I can install Ublock origin and that works out for me.

uBO lite blocks between most and all of the ads, at least on the sites I browse. I honestly didn't notice a difference switching over.

I'm actually more curious to hear what sites it doesn't do a good job on.

ublock origin lite is blocking a bunch of stuff for me, and things are unbearable when I turn it off.

For many sites, especially news sites, I toggle javascript off. It's reasonably easy to do per site in chrome (click left of location bar and "site settings"). I don't know if there is an easy way to do this per site in firefox.

So far I've stuck with chrome for a few reasons:

- Mozilla doesn't implement desktop PWA and has cancelled the project. I use this. - Mozilla was using about twice as much memory as chrome. (I need to revisit this, Chrome seems to have gotten fatter.) - Safari is a royal pain to write your own extensions (last I checked you need to create an application and bundle the extension into it). - I like the multiple profiles in Chrome to sandbox things like my google login. There may be a firefox equivalent, however.

I was under the impression MV3 is stricly less capable in terms of blocking ability than MV2?

Yeah. MV3 is a faster but less capable version.

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.

There is a limit on how large the list can be, depending on the browser.

I also thought under MV3 you could block ads, but not the tracking that they do.

JavaScript really isn't that slow. JIT compilation can wind up faster than AOT compilation. And much of the APIs called by JavaScript is natively-implemented browser code. JavaScript is faster than C# yet people implement games in C# (not the engine cores, but that's a very similar situation to JS) and don't bat an eye.

> JavaScript is faster than C#

Apples to oranges, scripts need an entire browser/Interpeter framework underneath it to even function

See the mentioned game engine reference which closely parallels this.

> JavaScript is faster than C#

Are you joking? C# is in another leage, when we talk about performance.

But a list of like 100 domains will get rid of most major ad services.

that is theoretically true. but i switched to the v3-compatible ublock origin lite a year ago and i've noticed essentially no difference in the performance. all the ads are blocked, just like they were with the v2-compatible adblocker.

MV3 is not an improvement over MV2 for the purposes of ad blocking.

The headline is correct. The popular ones like uBO are 100% dead on Chrome thanks to googles coercion.

They didn't just "switch". They had to fundamentally change how they block ads and the new version the adtech company forced upon everyone...drumroll...is less effective at blocking ads. What a coincidence!

Per uBlock:

>uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage because many filters can't be converted into DNR rules

uBlock Origin Light is still pretty good though. Maybe it's good enough for most people?

That presumably was the point. Move the goal post but only incrementally and so much that people will tolerate it

I think you are overthinking it. If Chrome actually wanted to ban ad blockers they could just do it.

Firefox is great, and the community "zen" fork is even nicer.

Maybe you could expand inline in your comment about what makes Zen “even nicer”

Not the OP, but I appreciated its attempts to declutter and rethink the layout. It encourages a full screen, minimalist style, and jumping between workspaces for different task sets. Hovering and slide out menus rather than permanent bars (although those are still an option). It also brought in some features like Split View before they hit mainline Firefox releases.

Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...

I've wanted to love Zen for a while, I really have, but every time I start using it, it just feels... I don't know... foreign? Too new for comfort?

I think it's one of those "once you get used to it, you never go back" technologies, but I also think it takes a bit of time to get used to it. Thoughts?

Been a happy user of Zen for at least a year now. Big fan of the clean UI and vertical tabs. Super stable, no issues. Not in love with their tab group implementation, but its fine.

Firefox is great. Safari is also pretty good, Apple ADP is true e2e encrypted bookmarks, history and so on. I really do not see the reason to be using Chrome for multiple years now.

Naive question: will it not be possible for ad blockers to upgrade to ManifestV3? Is there something about it that makes ad blocking much harder. What does Manifest actually do?

Most ad blockers do already use MV3, uBlock Origin is the only one still using V2 as far as I know.

There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...

If this is clickbait, you are a google shill. The limitations of v3 are very clearly explained on the ublock homepage:

uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective.

    Cannot use all filter lists simultaneously (rule limits apply)
    No cosmetic filtering in the default mode
    No scriptlet injection by default
    Limited dynamic filtering capabilities
    Requires broader host permissions upfront

The part no one gets is that mv3 by design cannot do privacy protection by stripping tracking tags. Any sort of programatic URL manipulation or introspection is impossible by design. Advertisers can switch to a scheme of base64 query params inside URLs, and there's nothing MV3 based adblockers can do to filter this

There is ublock origin lite[0] on chromium which is the v3 compliant ad blocking strategy, but it is severely limited by the new ruleset and limitations, being a crippled version.

There are more details available on this fan site of ublock[1]:

> What Was Manifest V3?

> Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking.

> How This Affected uBlock Origin

> uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025.

[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

[1]: https://ublockorigin.com/

People are still using the spying machine in June '26 ?

Well this is a wake-up call folks, time to switch away from that abomination.

I've been using Orion with Kagi for search. Every once in a while I hit a site that won't work on Orion (looking at you Cafe Zupas), but then I jump over to firefox.

Use brave. I've been using it for the last...I don't know... 6 years? Internet is unusable for me without it. It even makes YouTube usable again.

This will be great for all Enterprise customers.

Employees at companies using corporate computers love a good malicious popup, right?

Will Brave, which is based in Chromium, still block ads? Since they are changing Chromium, I don't think so.

Pretty sure Brave shields isn't based on an extension API so it shouldn't be affected.

Have people actually noticed worse performance from uBlock Origin lite?

This article isn't nuanced enough. Ad blockers will continue to work.

I mostly use ublock origin light on my work laptop for YouTube and I've never seen an ad.

I have noticed it to be slightly worse, mostly on "bad" sites. Just using Brave at this point though.

I'm still confused about what makes uBlock Origin Lite less powerful than uBlock Origin. I don't use it or Chrome in any case, but I would prefer to understand the difference.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

The ones Brave choose to block, sure. You're going to end up with the same problem eventually.

In my experience they're sometimes a little too aggressive and I have to disable the "shields" for the page to function correctly. I have never seen an add while using Brave and that's after 1.5 million trackers blocked and 50 gb bandwidth "saved".

The only browser I would switch to away from Brave is one that, as was described by another user in here, sandboxes all pages/domains and ensures that no data leaks outside unless you are actively allowing it. Think Qubes OS but for browsers. I imagine a nice "drag this domain-box into the Facebook domain blob of a tree structure to allow linking and sharing of data" would be a cool feature. That would make it easy to select and confirm which FAANG company gets your data on which domain.

I mentioned this above, but Brave both includes its own ad blocking engine and has also added support for the MV2 version of UBo to the core engine.

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

Does anyone use any Firefox forks (Waterfox, Librewolf, etc.) as their primary browser for privacy and performance reasons? I know Zen is fairly popular for it's UI choices but I am interested to see if any of the other options are actually superior to Firefox.

i keep hoping google will stop giving me reasons to switch ,because i can't be bothered to move all my passwords and stuff over, but every year they keep making it harder.

Likewise, I desperately want to stay on windows because of anticheat, but every year they keep making it harder.

Make the switch now! Gaming on Linux is really only getting better every year with much hard work from valve.

Outside of developers opting out pretty much every single game works out of the box. I value my limited leisure time and to be able to just jump on my computer and start playing without any annoying nags about windows updates or restart this and strange unexplainable issues.

Move all of your passwords and logins too!

Someone in the Thief community was celebrating the Nightdive remaster announcement because it is apparently getting much harder with each passing year to install and run the Dark Engine games on Windows; meanwhile I've been doing this multiple times a year for about a decade with Lutris.

There are still games you simply can't play on Linux, e.g. Valorant/LoL can't be played on Linux because of Riot Game's kernel-level anti-cheat. And as a highly addicted LoL player it's one of the only two reasons I still have Windows taking up 200GB of my precious hard drive space.

Stop playing Valorant/LoL until its available, its as simple as that really.

Vote with your wallet

Those passwords are not yours unless you did the work and enabled on-device encryption which is disabled by default.

There's an automatic import tool. It takes 30s. Settings -> Import Browser Data. Select Chrome. It even prompts you during installation, in case you don't want to scan through the settings page.

It takes two mouse clicks to import bookmarks, cookies and passwords from one browser to another.

First line of defense is local DNS based adblocking followed by Brave on all devices. The only time I see ads or Eurocrat cookie nonsense is when GitHub rate limits access to the updated filter lists. Let's hope this will hold for a while.

For all the folks that proudly say “fine I will use browser X instead!” Don’t you realize the next step is to slowly change chrome so sites will work in chrome, but not other minority browsers?

Google is playing the long game. Boil the frogs slowly.

"This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers... Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit."

This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.

This is a bit of a sensationalist headline. MV3 ad blocking extensions like uBO Lite work fine for 99.9% of cases. MV3 certainly is a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world for ad blocking.

I’m going home for a visit. Will make sure to switch the family over to Firefox and explain why. Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that.

> Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that.

This is one of my earliest tech memories. It was so fast when it came out.

The Ladybird browser could potentially be a nice alternative in the future: https://ladybird.org/

that thing has been in development for the past 10 years. At this point, I doubt we ever see it.

It is gaining more contributors and starting to be relatively compliant with most browser standards. Alpha release is expected EoY. I am optimistic for its future.

10 years is far from the truth. SerenityOS was started 8 years ago and ladybird wasn't split from Serenity until 2024 and has an alpha scheduled for release this year.

It's been 2-4 years max.

I do not mind advertising on websites. What I mind is bad ads, ads with malware, way too many ads, and ads that track me. This is where Google gets the whole ad thing wrong. They are focusing on the wrong problem.

If you think about the economics of it, a very popular website could survive on only on ad because the advertiser would pay a premium to be seen on the website.

So that is my other argument, bad websites need a whole bunch of ads to be profitable. So better websites would help as well.

The thing is that they don’t care about what you and I mind or don’t mind. The only goal is to maximize profit to shareholders. Our only option is to use ad blockers for now.

The problem with that logic is that if one advertiser is willing to pay a premium for placement on the site, more advertisers likely are. Which creates a perverse incentive to inject exactly as many ads as most users will put up with, which shifts the users' perspective on the amount of acceptable ads, which encourages more ad placement. Rinse, repeat until you reach the current state of affairs.

Seems like the affected version of chrome is 150 and 151, and the timewindow is near.

Because of ungoogled-chromium, I'm used to manually update the browser. This time I won't update until MV2 problem is solved properly. I've already lost my extensions once by updating to 138 without checking google's adversarial move, and got the forbidden knowledge that I cannot manually downgrade chromium because it won't start.

I am scared that with the current status quo, when websites mostly served on chrome start benefiting from the ability to guarantee ad display, that they might start blocking any client that doesn't support it. When that happens we'll start seeing the web degrade in a huge way. This is a huge loss for everyone, I'm very upset with Google for pushing this monopolistic garbage.

It's obviously not perfect but DNS-level ad blockers like Pihole or Adguard Home still make a dramatic difference, so all is not lost.

If Google ever decides to "close the door" on these too, all they need to do is make Chrome always use DoH instead of classic DNS.

I don't think this would fly between enterprise usage of custom DNS, captive portals, privacy protection etc

Do you mean that that Chrome would force users to use 8.8.8.8 as DNS provider? I don't think this would be acceptable or accepted.

You can block DoH by blacklisting their domains (which is what ControlD and NextDNS do, by the way).

Leaving Chrome is 1000x easier than maintaining that.

What a time! A browser was supposed to be the "user agent".

Regardless of what people say about Firefox, I've been using it for uBlock Origin and containers for ages, and won't be trading it for whatever performance, battery life, compatibility gains people continue to use Chrome for. Choose whatever is important for you, though.

I use brave and it seems to work just fine against ads. Brave also has lower memory consumption than google chrome.

My approach is ubolite/no script/privacy badger for when I really want chrome.

Otherwise I just run Brave. Always brave on mobile since chrome native doesn't support extensions. Seems fine for me. Oh and I set my DNS server to adguard

Probably some pixels or whatever get through but I don't have to see ads shrug

I and I hope many others globally will not care. Since the last months I reverted my browsers from 6-0 in favour of Chrome to 1-5 for Firefox and the one Chrome accesses local adfree sites at work. We are gonna see a revival of Firefox, hopefully like its 2006.

Brave, Vivaldi (successor of opera), a few others also based on chromium work just fine. No ads.

I'm also on brave and they've promised support for M2 for the future but they're of course a fork of chromium, so we'll have to see how committed they are to implement improvements that they can't simply merge in due to conflicting behaviours. Which you can almost guarantee Google will do.

Inbuilt ad blockers aren't affected by whatever change Google may do to the extension ecosystem.

On Chrome* Firefox is just fine.

I wonder what degoogled chromium will do. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to drop MV2 support given all the other stuff they're doing, but it would be nice if I could continue to use full uBlock with it.

I don't have an ad blocker.

I have two bookmarklets:

- remove all IFrames

- remove all display:fixed elements

Both also use a mutation observer to catch new instances.

This takes care of 90% of the annoying ads and cookie popups. To push for more leads into excess complexity for marginal gain.

That doesn't block tracking.

This is a non-story, insofar as the V3 shutdown has been in the works for years and has been rolled out since a year ago at least. I stopped being able to use them about six months ago.

Sad truth is, internet isn't really worth browsing anymore.

Disconnect your internet service then.

My phone's internet malfunctions and I never bothered to fix it.

End user will close the door on using Chrome for any reason...

There's so many chromium forks that I can't find one reason to stick with Google Chrome. I hope more people switch. Both Vivaldi and Brave are superior.

This is not true. There are other APIs extensions can use to block ads and browsers like Brave have ad blocking built into the engine itself.

No surprise Google is being Google and Chrome is great bloated spyware closing out those ad blockers is part of the game.

> Meta’s Chief Security Officer resigned the very next day.

It would have been very funny if they reassigned him to data labeling too.

i have been using uBlock Origin Lite and haven't missed MV2 at all? What's the outrage?

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

UBlock Origin Lite has been working fine (I had no idea MV2 wasn't actually disabled yet), and uses MV3.

I've been using private DNS for couple of years now, almost never miss browser level blocking now

Better title: “Google Chrome's Next Update Will Drive Privacy-Minded Users To Other Browsers“

Ungoogled Chromium for when I need profiles. Firefox for everything else and DuckDuckGo on iOS

Blocking ads at the network level seems to be the right approach moving forward.

Chrome is the new Internet Exploder.

Use anything with built-in adblock-rust.

Can we update the title, should be, "Google Chrome's next update will mark the end of me using it"

I'm surprised you were using a proprietary browser in the first place

And I will be closing the door on Chrome

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970

"Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension" really doesn't tell a general audience what is happening here. No wonder it gained little notice.

The current title is a lot better.

You mean the title of this post? It's much worse, in my opinion - plenty of strong ad blockers run on MV3. Even the developer of uBlock Origin (Lite) seems to have conceded that the MV3 approach is less resource intensive and didn't require sacrificing any of the features that 99.9% of users use.

Do you have a source for this ?

MV2 and MV3 is completely uninteresting for me. But you'll have to take my advblocker from my dead cold hands

Neither does MV3 close the door on ad blockers. This title seems like gigantic clickbait.

There have been quite a few threads about it recently - unfortunately I don't have time to dig up links at the moment.

(also, 450+ comments is not little notice!)

Previous link is referenced in this submission as a source, and was updated with the same info that was included in this submission. Same discussion.

For an abuse of monopoly power this big, I would argue that only getting ~400 upvotes is indeed little notice.

Increasingly, LLMs are my browser.

Now, if there were just an LLM browser that would fetch a page, strip the ads, and serve me that…

and after some traction serve you ads via the LLM itself (a la brave browser)?

To be sure, air some point I will no longer trust the cloud-based LLMs… Sounds though like a task that would be easy for the more recent downloadable (local) LLMs.

uBO lite has been working flawlessly for me for the past couple of years.

Firefox.

I'm sorry for the glib comment but "they could just not do this"

Seriously. Imagine a company that solicits advice from the public. Not all of it is going to be good. The customer isn't always right, but basically the reaction to Should We Do This would be Fuck No

But they'll do it anyway. You should get fired from your job if you just plow ahead like this

Title: Ad company makes a browser update to disable ad blocking

News at 11.

Fuck Google

tl;dr MV2 is going away (after already being deprecated a while ago). MV3 exists, you're probably already using it in your adblocker.

Stop suggesting this Firefox crap which is not only much slower but it also can't even properly manage RAM usage on mobile, leading to app being killed on my low-RAM device, chrome can deal with it even though that's a "desktop" version with extensions for a much newer high end device.

Restricting webRequestBlocking (but it's not going away, just needs a policy extension) and synchronous executeScript did in practice make adblockers unreliable though.. I partially worked it around by using a custom extension that uses the recent userScripts API..

BTW, it's not possible to inject scripts to workers like a ServiceWorker or to replace it's content (DNR let's you redirect but this redirect breaks SW origin + it's visible when you disallow redirects), but MV2 was no better, chrome extensions never had advanced capabilities for ad blocking, a bug about not being able to access POST data via webRequest was open for 10+ years and will probably never be fixed.

But still, firefox is not the alternative, even WebKit is much better.

How little RAM does your phone have? My Moto G4 Power (less than $200, before the RAM crunch much less) with 2 GB runs Firefox hunky-dory, and I'm one of those triple-digit tab people.

It's not about the number of (possibly sleeping) tabs, it's about how FF doesn't manage those active ones to prevent the app from crashing.. try opening 10 instagram profiles (via open in new tab) in the web browser.

I told you all that Chrome doesn't crash, FF does + pages work much slower.

Have you verified what caused the crash via logcat? Firefox has never crashed in my case, not even once (but I'm not running a low ram device).

That was nearly a year ago because chrome with extensions then arrived, but I did verify it was caused by RAM (usage was growing as FF was loading these tabs in background), then I did set some tweak in about:config which made the issue a little less severe (open in new tab didn't start loading them), but it still crashed if I then manually switched tabs, FF did not unload previous ones despite running out of RAM.

You obviously don't know how Android works. When an app hasn't been open for a while and it has no background tasks, it gets put to sleep. Waking it up takes a second.

You can delay that by selecting the app in the settings and choosing its Battery setting to Unrestricted, however, despite its name, it will still get suspended

The checks are poorly coded. Even on Unrestricted, if you play music from a web player, the browser will get suspended after the song ends but before a new one starts playing because there's a point where it awaits data on the foreground task, Android sees it has no background tasks and suspends it.

Man, I backported freezer v2 cgroup implementation into 4.4 kernel so these cached tasks are suspended, don't tell me how Android works please :)

What are you running, Android 9.0?

LineageOS 22.2 which is Android 15, but yes, the device originally came with Android 9.

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