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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

This is ultimately the endpoint of all Chromium-based browsers. Even the most stalwart will throw in the towel on MV2 support sooner or later, because the effort required to maintain non-trivial patches against mainline becomes too great for the team to keep up with.

It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.

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This has been obvious to everyone who knows that the key feature to the devs of these browsers is “-based.” None of the chromium-based browsers are anything other than UI tweaks and certain extensions being included by default. None of them rewrite significant parts of the browser engine, because that would be too much extra work.

The only projects which have a hope of maintaining MV2 compatibility are those who are a hard fork of an earlier version of chromium or a totally different engine.

To my point: The article mentions that Opera still says they will maintain MV2 for as long as it is “technically reasonable.” Mark my works, Google will find a way to break Opera’s MV2 patches that makes it too hard to maintain.

I keep telling that folks shipping Chrome forks and Electron junk have helped Google turn the Web into ChromeOS Platform.

And then they complain about Safari.

Had it been today, and Google would have no issue pushing for PNaCL.

I don't think this is the case.

Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.

I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.

Maybe things have stabilized a bit?

I worked on multiple projects modifying Chromium and V8 a decade ago, and the GP matches my experience exactly. Absolute mountains of dev time just tracking the latest release and what we wanted to do wasn’t limited to one module or subsystem.

> open source nature is something of a technicality

No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.

That's kinda true with every open source software. As soon as some branch has a sizable chunk of developers, forks are discouraged, because either you need to keep up or give up eventually. That's what makes torvalds/linux special and why people want to upstream. If the upstream doesn't accept: oh well.

> Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google

The main thing that is affecting adblockers with this MV2/MV3 change is the ability to dynamically block requests themselves rather than have to give a pre-computed list of patterns to the browser.

We're talking about hooking into right before http requests go out and make them fail here. Let's not pretend that maintaining this capability is out of reach for any serious fork if they actually cared. Let's also not pretend it's more than a few hours per month of dev time per month to maintain it (and most months it will be 0 hours).

And before you ask: Yes, I have worked extensively with chromium's codebase when I worked for a kiosk company.

Brave's built in adblocker is on par to uBlock Origin for me.

Does it have the same configurability though? Custom lists and the like? I really need those.

I'd use Brave if someone made a fork with all the BAT token stuff removed but I haven't seen one.

Brave sort of created that themselves, it’s called Brave Origin and allows you to have a browser without all the cruft compiled in. Believe it or not, it’s meant to be a paid product, but it’s (intentionally) free on Linux.

Now, on Linux there’s also a setting in regular Brave which allows you to uncover per-feature switches to disable offending elements and retain some, which is the way I use it, to avoid having to reinstall Brave. I’m guessing this isn’t available on Windows without getting a licence?

Regardless, Zen is still the better main browser, particularly on Linux... but Brave is a fine second choice IMHO.

Brave still maintains MV2 support (for now) so you get to use full-fat uBlock Origin. Eventually, I imagine they'll tire of it, say "well just use the built-in one", and get rid of MV2 when it gets too obnoxious to maintain.

I go through a 5 minute ritual every time I reimage/build a PC of installing Brave and disabling all the garbage on it. It's worth it to get Chromium compatibility and speed with uBlock Origin.

Ah I prefer firefox anyway. It has some features I can't do without. Like the multi-account containers. And its sync that is end to end encrypted.

But I might have a look at brave for the 1-2 sites I still use chromium for because they don't work with firefox properly (especially Microsoft 365 of course, as usual).

I tried to get myself a custom "Brave Origin" some time ago, but just like upstream Chromium, some related code are just poorly guarded, it's not really trivial to do it and keep it up with upstream.

Ah interesting, I didn't know Brave Origin even existed.

It's not something I'd pay for though. I'd pay for firefox but not another chromium browser.

> I'd use Brave if someone made a fork with all the BAT token stuff removed but I haven't seen one.

https://brave.com/origin/

It's nice and I didn't know about it but I wouldn't pay for it. Not for another chromium browser.

I would easily pay 60/yr for firefox though if Mozilla would let me. I'm not donating to the foundation, they waste too much money on stuff that doesn't matter. I don't want them to be an NGO, I just want them to make a good browser :)

They have a store selling caps, t-shirts and keyboards. That's one way to donate while getting cool stuff

Isn't that the same problem though, that the profit goes to the foundation not the corporation?

However it is a nice idea, I would love a firefox mug or something. Microsoft has lobbied our company to remove firefox and chrome from all computers so we must use edge everywhere and it would be a nice passive-agressive move for me to have firefox merchandise everywhere. I work in IT so the people that decided this shit are around me.

Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the ad blocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the built-in ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.

Fortunately all you need is one clanker to maintain the patches. What used to be immensely expensive human work (and tedious!), is now just ”claude please re-enable manifest v2 and rebuild an installer”

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