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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why with LLMs we can't just add MV2/blocking web request support to Chromium in a fork.

The argument against was always that it's "too hard to keep a fork in sync". Now it's easier.

That's basically exactly what Brave (the only Chromium browser still supporting uBO) is doing to support uBlock Origin. But it's flimsy and likely has an expiration date.

AFAIK they are using the built-in support which Google still maintains even if they don't expose it.

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.

Or you could just use Firefox.

The only reason that Google keep Firefox around is because they find it beneficial for antitrust reasons.

We should prepare for a future without Firefox, because one day it won't be there anymore.

by supporting google?

It's not because of LLMs. It's because Google only stripped MV2 support but didn't strip the webRequest API that is at the center of this whole thing. It's pretty simple to maintain a fork that just supports the MV2 standard if the APIs are still there. If Google ever decides to finally remove the API, it would certainly be a much larger challenge

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