Google resumes transition to Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions (opens in new tab)

Agree, that's why I always sticked to FF even when Chrome had superior performance and/or functionality. Giving such leverage to a company that lives of pushing ads into your face is insanity.

Fork chrome, or switch to firefox.

For each 10 ft wall youtube builds uBlock will eventually find a 11 ft ladder.

No. People that care will simply stop using Chrome.

No. Use Firefox and you will survive.

uBlock Origin works best in Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

to them who find this comment exagerated (hyperbollic?)

there are things that through symbolism come to signify life-or-death scenario across different contexts (i.e. life or dead of what-exactly?)

these "ad-tech" wars aren't about technology as much as they (really) are about (the future?) of user freedom.

freedom is the key word (symbol) which links this difficult real world contest into the nuclear leagues

I really don't like advertising, but it's a non-lethal nuisance.

> Despite losing a small part of their functionality, ad blockers will still be able to offer nearly the same quality of filtering that they demonstrated with Manifest V2.

If some mechanism or capability is no longer possible or is made infeasible for adblockers to control, then ads will simply switch to using that mechanism. It's a pretty obvious outcome. You cannot simply give just an inch with adtech.

> That approach doesn't work well given Firefox's established track record of just imitating Chrome

Established track record? What?

> and then getting rid of the prior (and better) way of doing things.

Do you mean how they did the complete opposite by keeping Manifest v2 around for much longer than Google wanted to? Then by making their own Manifest v3 that didn't gimp ad blockers like google has been trying to for years?

> XUL extension developers are well aware of this problem, for example.

XUL was super useful... for it's time.

But it became a drag on performance as Firefox became more optimised for multi-core CPUs. And it became a drag for developers trying to support an older standard. Sure the new extension standard became more difficult to get started, but it did push the workers standards forwards which is ultimately what the web needed.

> We've seen it happen repeatedly with Firefox's UI, too.

Firefox's UI goes up and down in quality all the time. Thinking nothing is improving at all is an observational bias.

Firefox has removed a lot of features, but they view ad blocking as a core selling point for the Firefox product. They've published a handful of blog posts endorsing specific ad blockers, including AdNauseum, an extension that Google considers to be malware because its purpose is to facilitate the user DoSing Google ad servers. So Mozilla will very likely never leave their implementation of the extensions API deficient for ad blockers. They've laid out exactly what they promise to continue providing in the API, in no uncertain terms.

Many of the changes to FF over the last several years have been, in my opinion, just plain bad.

That said, it's not like there's a large amount of choice in the browser space. Today's Firefox can be worse (in ways that are important to you & I) than yesterday's but still be the best of the options available to us today.

My opinion, and the reason I switched back to FF, is that FF is the "least bad" option we have.

If the biggest knock against Firefox is that it imitates Chrome too often, that's hardly a reason to stick with Chrome.

And they aren't afraid to diverge from Chrome in important ways. For example, letting you disable 3p cookies already.

They have to, since big silicon valley companies just copy things and sell it as their own, like everyone exists to wipe their arses. Essentially they are stealing whatever they can find. If you copy and coexist with them they can't steal shit, and since they can't innovate, because they lack the brainspace for it, they'll slowly die. Maybe this is one of the reasons Firefox acts like a braindead monkey.

No one was willing to keep supporting XUL.

> In typical internet mob fashion Apple doing this is considered doubleplusgood, Google doing it is them being evil and trying to kill the Internet.

It wasn't actually considered good that Apple killed the safariextz format. There were a ton of complaints among Safari users.

But of course Safari for Mac has a small marketshare, given its nonexistence on Windows (since Safari for Windows was discontinued in 2012), so it can't kill the Internet. On the other hand, plenty of people think that Apple's browser engine restrictions on iOS are killing the Internet.

The difference is that Google is an ad company, as in the vast majority of their revenue comes from ads. Apple is not an ad company. As such, Apple gets the benefit of doubt in these situations because their bottom line doesn’t rely upon misleading users into sharing more data or viewing more ads.

Apple and Google have drastically different profit incentives.

I recall many complaints about it when Apple started doing it. Google is just making sure they inflict as much bad PR on themselves as possible by dragging the change out as slowly as they, can which makes it seem like there's a double standard.

There isn't though. Safari is one of the most complained about pieces of software on here. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if it was the most complained about.

First, the security argument is BS. Google is no way more trustworthy than Adblock developers; quite the opposite, given incentives.

Second, Google is hostile towards users. Apple isn’t. This means they would use the same mechanism for different purposes.

> In typical internet mob fashion Apple doing this is considered doubleplusgood, Google doing it is them being evil and trying to kill the Internet.

Apple has neither Chrome's market share nor Google's advertising network. Context matters.

> though Safari ad blockers seem to get by well enough

I have yet to find an ad blocker that manages to block anywhere close to as many ads as ublock origin. AdGuard is certainly better than nothing at all, but I still see an awful lot of ads while using it.

It's more about a conflict of interest.

An advertising company investing in a new API that will make it earn less – that's the point.

Brave's adblocker is written in Rust [0] and compiled to native code; it's not affected by the Mv3 transition because it doesn't use extension APIs. Brave also publicly committed [1] to continuing support for Mv2 through patches.

[0] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust [1] https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446

Why make claims you have no clue about? As someone said above Brave is NOT affected, their adblocker is a the very core of the browser and a basic chromium extension.

Couldn't they modify the fork in a way to not implement v3?

For the most part I agree with your quote save for the “stuck in the past, unable to adapt” part, I’d replace with “lag behind”.

If the things continue to develop the way they are now, the new features will be eventually incorporated into DNR (in somewhat different form, but anyways). Basically, the “innovation” should be requested via the W3C group from the browsers and only then (after quite some time) it can be used as a part of DNR.

Is it worse than what we had before? Absolutely, adding anything to DNR is now a many-months process.

Do we get anything in return? We actually do, the changes and improvements that are being made to the extensions platform are significant.

I’d say that the situation changed from “MV3 is bad, DNR is unusable” to “MV3 is good, DNR is useable-but-limited”.

Which evidently you need to be in some "developer mode" to have work??

I use this all the time just to improve websites I visit, change colors or adjust workflows to make them less jank. My work jira is reskinned with violet monkey.

They're called userscripts. Making folks have to enter a dev mode to use them feels abominable.

Also seems like this narrowly targets just userscripting cases, while ignoring any other use cases where we might want to have dynamic behavior. It still doesn't allow me to write an extension that lets me ship up code & run it. I get this is by design, to improve security, but it feels so much less like my user agent when I'm outlawed from running whole categories of code in the browser.

My best hope is that many of the dynamic code practices are enforced chiefly by the web store. And that we can sideload whatever we want.

> But manifest v2 isn't actually disappearing, it's a chrome web store policy. You can still manually install the crx.

It is actually disappearing. Re-read the announcement. Google Chrome will be disabling MV2 extensions. It's not just a Web Store policy.