Next will be the litany of comments pointing out that the declarative API works reasonably well for blocking ads. That's mostly true, for now. Google's shown in several different areas that they know how to slow-roll the real objective over years, when needed.
This is roughly the equivalent of taking a heuristic malware blocker and making it depend solely on file names or file checksums. I can't prove it, but I feel like it's only the first shoe dropping.
How does MV3 affect content script injection? I looked a bit more into how uBO does xhr-content based filtering (like it uses to block YT ads) and it appears to shim the fetch() method. Would this approach still work in a MV3 world? And if it does still work, doesn't this negate any supposed security/privacy benefits of the declarative model?
What's the problem to let user chose to let that specific extension to use the more invasive access mode, like we already do with other extension permissions?
I don't think there is personally, but how do you reliably keep track that it was the user that made that choice, and not some installer on the machine? I.e. Ol' McDonald AntiVirus installs an extension for scanning that marks the extension as approved like that, and then updates to also use it to inject their own ads for other security products.
I know the submission title matches the title of the Reddit post, but both titles are misleading—Google didn't mention uBO by name, they just confirmed that all Manifest v2 extensions will be disabled.
Sure, but in the context of a headline/submission title, "Google confirms they will disable uBlock Origin" strongly implies that Google mentioned uBO by name, which they did not. The news articles that the Reddit post links to have more general headlines for that reason.
Plus, for me at least, there are plenty of other extensions I'd like to continue using, not just uBO :(
So whether a consequence of #2 is #1 doesn’t change the fact that #1 and #2 as headlines mean different things and imply very different ideas around the scope and intention of the action.
Yes, but the title of the Reddit thread is the title used here, so that complicates the situation. The title is accurate and not editorialized in that context.
People are talking about it because of the effects on uBlock origin. Nobody at large cares that Google is finally pulling the plug on v2 extensions.
While we avoid low quality re-print/syndication, it is normal to submit and discuss secondary commentary on HN. Think of all the “X did Y, here is why it matters” style blog posts.
Sure, but surely you agree there's a difference in implication, right?
Like, if a headline says "McDonald's Announces It Will Stop Serving McNuggets to Donald Trump", and the story was actually that McDonald's was discontinuing McNuggets altogether (and therefore also to Trump), would you call that misleading or just an honest application of the transitive property?
If McDonalds sees a certain politician walking toward their register eyeing the picture of nuggets on the overhead screen, and they frantically rush to slap “sold out indefinitely” there… well, then I’ll think they had an agenda.
Chrome wants to get ad revenue on YouTube, but those ads are blocked. Now, it after many years finally decides Manifest v2 has to go? Suspicious.
> would you call that misleading or just an honest application of the transitive property?
The latter because McDonalds managers have been publicly discussing how and why they should stop serving nuggets to Trump in order to better protect their customers
Of course Google don't mention uBO by name. But this is the real reason they are doing it. Privacy is just a pretext.
uBO lite will still be available but it will be very nerfed.
Hopefully people move to Firefox, but I'm not so optimistic. It took a huge campaign to get people to move from IE6 to Firefox, and I'm not certain it can be replicated with Chrome.
Plus the new api don't even prevent you from peeking the traffic. Only prevent you from modify it. How is this able to improve privacy?
And the biggest user of traffic modification? You got it, it's all sorts of adblocks. They are literally not trying to hide it. Or they should probably also limit apis that are able to peeking the traffics.
Manifest v3 is killing current WebRequest API so you won't be able to filter requests on the fly (sort of playing man in the middle).
This means uBlock won't be as effective because once web request is done\page\script is loaded - it is impossible to stop it from loading other scripts.
Also it limits how many or what urls can be filtered at all if I'm not mistaken.
Switching to an extension providing a list of things to block or redirect to the browser rather than the extension having access to all content on every page that you visit.
I'd imagine that people don't vet extensions nearly as much as they should for the access they give them to all their web browser traffic. Not to mention an extension that is okay now may not be once sold to someone else (for those extension developers not as honorable as those of uBlock Origin and hoverzoom).
Oh man I've seen that happen before eg. a JSON parser
I feel the same. It's crazy what kind of extensions people just use, there is one called Snov or something, to add a pixel in emails... it's like dude, you gave this random company access to read your emails... idk.
which yeah... UBO but still that's open source at least. An extension you can view the source sure.
uBO is more exceptional than typical open source extensions. Its developers has shown themselves to be much more trustworthy and well-intentioned than Google.
I think, at some point, people should have the right to be stupid on their computers. What needs to change is holding them liable if their negligence affects others.
That sounds very similar to hiding behind sneaky talk in order to keep the practical effects in the background.
Almost no-one cares about the terms "Manifest v2 extensions" - because almost no one recognizes them for what they really are. Most people can understand it by its effect - that it will disable UBO. Only sneaky people will insist on using the technically correct, but obscure term in a PUBLIC announcement - clearly the aim is to make sure that the public overlooks the announcement.
According to this blog announcement, [1] Manifest 3 was announced on Nov 9th 2020 which had ~223M Firefox users and the last avaiable data says that on Nov 5th there is a ~187M users. This about ~36M not 60M.
That's alarming on its own, but I don't think the point of announcement of Mv3 is all that relevant, 99.9% of users aren't going to change their browser until they absolutely have to because they don't know what "Manifest v3" is, much less what it means for them.
Because the MPL/GPL is super restrictive if you’re trying to build any kind of sustainable business directly from Firefox code. Nothing big tech scale, but even just attempting to put food on the table with it risks lawsuits.
We are a small startup using Zoho and Notion (for developeras and knowledge base). We like Zoho. Whenever we felt like we need a solution now for some new requirement, they have it!
Some of their apps are very good like Books, Expense, Sign, Drive and Write, most are good enough and a few need more work (calendar, booking, and meet). When you need help there is always a person to talk to and they are pretty fast in support.
In dollar pricing, they are very cheap, but in India, they are still on pricey side. But worth every rupee we spend on them. Zoho CEO is bit of a character!
I switched to 95% firefox in 2021. I needed ad block on my phone browser due to some awful (but necessary) sites. I still use gmail for my main email and use other google-specific apps in my browser/phone. So I keep a chrome browser installed on my PC with my main google account logged in. I only use that for google stuff though. All other browsing is done in firefox. It's worked out great for me.
A lot of people use it
But if I wanted MS, we would have started on MS instead of Google Suite. Yeah, it's out there, but I agree with you, not a trustworthy option.
I've been de-googling myself slowly over the past 5 years or so. The shift has been marked, but even cynical old me is surprised how quickly they are turning on their user base.
The signs have been there all along though.
So... in all seriousness... Brave or Firefox? What about that Kagi Orion browser?
Does librewolf have a mobile version or can I sync Firefox stuff to libre so I can sync between Firefox and libre where needs require one or the other is installed?
It is only possible to use it currently if you are deep into Apple ecosystem.
I know it takes resources, but there is no other way.
To add: Browser itself is in quite good shape, maybe the best you get on iOS.
But for example, sync with iCloud only does not work in the long term. Vendor lock-in is hindering adaption.
I'd say that does not make a browser young, otherwise you would have to call Safari young too.
The goal of Orion is not to go for maximum possible market share, but to be the best browser for Mac. This specialization may be seen as a sign of maturity and devotion to a well-built, native user experience.
On the other hand, browsers like Chrome and Firefox are not native on Mac and look out of place when used on macOS. They do not use native controls and do not integrate native services. This is exactly because they are cross-platform and have to carry the burden of being built by a committee on all these platforms. Their design language traces back to the first platform they were designed for - Windows. So at least to me, they look 'young' and unpolished on a Mac despite being 20 years old. I doubt they even look and feel native on Windows any more, they are kind of hopelessly lost in translation. If that is a sign of maturity, then they did not age well.
Orion may be called young for many things, but not being cross-platform is not one of them. We'd like to build similar native experiences for other platforms, but you have to start somewhere. (Orion dev here, if it was not obvious)
Even if the browser would be the best browser on the Mac from UX side, people might not use it because they can’t use it elsewhere.
For example, every devoloper who currently buys Mac because of its power efficiency, that user base which is the most interested about privacy, is likely not adapting it because they use other operating systems too.
> Their design language traces back to the first platform they were designed for - Windows. So at least to me, they look 'young' and unpolished on a Mac despite being 20 years old. I doubt they look and feel native on Windows any more, they are kind of lost in translation. That is not a sign of maturity if you ask me.
That might be true, but in the end, does it matter? And what is good? If user buys Mac, does it mean that they wants everything to be Mac-like? There is already Safari.
Ideally, browser is used for browsing the internet. You want to see the websites, not the browser. Users still likely use mouse and scroll wheel for doing that.
The basic end-user is usually satisfied with search bar and being able to organize tabs and bookmarks. Basic end-user does not notice that <5% performance gain what focusing on single platform target might benefit.
If you compete with Safari on this, Safari already won becausd it was pre-installed.
The more advanced user, more settings buttons they want to see, and better extension support.
They want to configure things and see the websites. Whether the browser looks ”native” to the platform, is minor concern.
They want security updates fast. They want that websites work on that browser. They like privacy features, like Firefox containers. Is it gestures why they would change the browser? Only if it also fulfills all the above.
Not who you replied to but I'll chime in with a similar experience. I also moved away from gmail. I set it to forward all emails to my new account and slowly moved various services off of it to the point now that the only thing it receives is spam.
I originally tried proton mail. It was nice but I never took advantage of the encryption features. So I eventually settled on fastmail and I have zero complaints.
I still have my gmail accounts for a few things (SSO, sharing calendars), but I haven't logged into the email account in years.
I have Firefox installed on my phone (Android) as well, but I found Brave to be faster with its "baked in" ad blocker compared to Firefox Android + uBO.
Brave on Android is still an annoying software, with VPN, Rewards, and News icons in the burger menu that you can't disable. You can turn off the services, but the icons do not go away.
Google just keeps on digging in. Their search engine has been a smoldering SEO dumpster fire for the past 10 years; Now it’s blazing.
Chrome? Friends don’t let friends use Chrome. It’s the unadulterated Android OS of the browser world.
I’ve been considering Kagi, but I don’t see an easy way to pay for it without basically removing all anonymity… it really is a relentless yet boring dystopia.
Sure, but it doesn't have the same functionality [1]:
> With Manifest V3, uBlock is required to limit how many websites our users are able to add to their allow lists. Going forward, you'll only be able to add up to 5,000 websites to your allow lists.
> Moving forward, we’ll no longer be able to enable automatic daily updates to filter lists.
Features lost by the Ublock Origin V3 version by gorehill:
- No cosmetic filtering (##)
- No scriptlet injection (##+js)
- No redirect= filters
- No csp= filters
- No removeparam= filters
This isn't just a oh no we need to rewrite for V3, it's a very user hostile action to take control away from users.
Because only Google can be trusted of course.
I have been using Firefox since version 1 as my primary browser, originally because it had Firebug, and later out of apathy to change. I’m also weird in that I’ve been using DDG as my sole search engine for years. I haven’t felt like I’ve been held back by these tools in the slightest, whether for web development or personal use.
I like the idea of DDG, but its search results have always been noticeably weaker than Google and even Brave Search these days.
As an example, try searching "DuckDNS" on DDG. The homepage is nowhere to be found on the first several pages of DDG, but is rightfully the first result on Google.
Considering how much edge wants to gain back browser share, if they kept mv2 support the combination of supporting real ad blocking while still being a chromium browser is pretty appealing.
Exactly. Being able to effectively block ads is a highly desirable feature. All it takes is a well-funded marketing campaign that educates users when Google stops supporting MV2 extensions.
Hey, this one might actually finally help Firefox's marketshare. Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting anything massive, but imagine if people's adblockers got disabled over night: a horde of technically-inclined users, being newly-introduced to what the Internet currently is like to use without an adblocker, might just decide it's worth it to switch rather than try Manifest v3 adblockers and find out if it's really good enough. (It is not terrible right now, but really, why bother? It's not as good.)
I get the feeling that along with youtube anti-adblock efforts that this is google rifling-through-the-couch-cushions phase, and we'll see them actually execute this time because it's worth it.
Makes me wonder if they have plans to deal with FF as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see them stop paying for FF search box defaults or progressively negotiate lower payments each year.
Google is so reliant on ads, they will probably push through with this. More ads in search, YouTube, GMail and the wider Web is the only way for them to grow revenue. More other Google businesses are small fish compared to their ad revenue.
Let’s hope that other browser makers use this opportunity to attack. Chrome’s dominant market share is unhealthy for the Internet anyway.
That’s actually a meaningful way for other browser makers to differentiate themselves. Notably Firefox, but potentially also Microsoft Edge. While Edge is based on Chrome, they could decide to keep supporting manifest V2 extensions.
Why do people always say this as the reason for why they use a particular browser?
They're ALL blazingly fast. I'm not going for a coffee break to load a page.
It is the default choice nowadays. Most people on the Internet are not emotionally invested in whose browser they are using. They just want to use a browser that works on every site.
Unless you’re using Internet Explorer, every browser works on every site. I’ve never had Chrome installed even as a backup. Have yet to find a site that doesn’t work on Firefox.
The thing that makes chrome completely unusable to me is how you can't Ctrl-Tab between tabs in recently-used order.
Maybe it's possible to do it with an add-on but I don't like installing add-ons because they always want access to your complete browsing history. I'm not doing that just to restore basic functionality.
Whatever Google may wish, Chrome is not the internet. And given the choice, it is reasonable for a person to question why anyone would choose Chrome. I mean, I think there are plausible reasons[0], but it's an understandable view.
[0] Not caring about ads or privacy and wanting the easy path, mostly.
I've been using Firefox exclusively for a few years on Desktop and mobile, and it has been great.
It's pretty rare that something doesn't support Firefox, and usually it's some weird web tech demo I found on here. Nothing that I'd miss.
Ublock Origin is no small part of why I use Firefox for Android, and a redirection plug-in for old reddit, nitter, etc make following links in forums sufferable.
When Firefox is not supported it's usually because the website explicitly checks the user agent and not because of an actual compatibility issue, i.e. business.apple.com blocks Firefox specifically... which is an absolute joke because Apple has Apple resources.
This is the inverse of accurate, uBlock Origin already has a MV3 extension in progress (beta at https://ublockorigin.com/ top middle of the page). As others have noted, uBO is not even named in the Google releases, this applies to all MV2 extensions.
Annoyed they are barrelling ahead with this still, but not an attack on uBO or ad-blockers directly. Seems like they even made some changes to service workers to enable ad-blockers as well.
Perhaps gorhill will weigh in with more comments if he sees this. Curious if any of their changes to MV3 actually moved the needle on the issues previously identified.
Firefox is mainly funded by Google, if they've decided to be this aggressive about it, then I am guessing that they've absolved whatever restraint they had and that they're probably going to either force Firefox to follow suit, or cut funding.
Neither bodes well for the people's champion in the browser wars.
Given Chrome/Android doesn't support extensions at all, and Firefox/Android does, for Android you'd tend to prefer Firefox as your browser regardless.
(Or another browser which supports adblocking natively. I use EinkBro (on an e-ink device) most of the time; it has integrated ad-blocking. I believe Brave and Vivaldi will also provide ad-blocking.)
Vivaldi: Yep. "Vivaldi Browser on Android | Fast Android browser with Ad blocker" (from page title) <https://vivaldi.com/android/>
I am so glad, so glad I was proven right, I knew the second back in like 2009 when I tried chrome and right clicked on a youtube channel background and it didn't let me get the image link unlike firefox that Chrome was an evil that was going to creep to who knows what standards.
And here we are, 14 years later, Google finally slowly got its masterplan done, and it will keep getting worse.
While I have many grievances with Firefox, there is simply no alternative, the only real alternative is Firefox, don't even give Google the benefit of using chromium, if you truly care switch to Firefox and make everyone else switch, worst case scenario use a chromium alternative but please do not use Chrome anymore, if you are a techie swap everyone you know to an alternative browser.
It is the same as with YT anti-adblock: all it does is move people away from Chrome.
Chrome had a good run, but it is time again to help family members and organisations to migrate to ... firefox and never look back. Google has lost its ways and i am sure that "don´t do evil" was just replaced by "do evil stuff in a sneaky way".
Fortunately, the MV3 implementation in Firefox has the necessary tweaks to continue supporting add-ons like uBlock Origin[1]. So, even when MV2 is eventually dropped in Firefox, ad-blocking add-ons written for Firefox will continue to be able to work without restrictions.
Manifest V3 is mostly a good idea. Global variables only live for a few minutes, so extensions have to keep state in a key-value store instead. The code is more tedious, but this also helps extensions run well on Firefox for Android, where the OS kills processes at random.
The main problem with Manifest V3 is that Google used the API version bump as an opportunity to remove the 'blocking webRequest' API from Chrome. Firefox is keeping the API:
They can, but that means dealing with the overhead that comes with maintaining a divergent and ever increasingly different code base from the forking point.
Every single browser except for Safari and Firechrome today is based off Chromium because devs are either lazy or incapable of writing and maintaining their own browser engines.
So can browsers forked from Chromium ignore this and keep MV2? Sure. Will they? Hell no.
Google pay other browser vendors significant amounts to be the default search engine. If any browser were too far ahead of Chrome on blocking advertising, wouldn't Google care substantially less about being the default search engine on that browser? Ad blockers switch off the primary revenue stream for browsers & websites alike.
It turns out the answer 13 years on really was "make boatloads of money." That's it. That's all they have. They don't know how to innovate anymore. Tightening their grip is the final strategy.
Presumably, Mozilla or someone else, will provide a side-loadable version of Firefox for iOS with regular manifest v2 / v3 support. Android users already have this via the Play Store and it works great since Google doesn't ban other browser / rendering engines.
Brave is built on the open source Chromium project. As long as it's open source they can't stop Brave doing whatever they want and ignoring these changes.
This is dumb. Manifest v3 is better than v2. For security, privacy, efficiency, reliability, etc. uBlock origin will work just fine, and be a hell of a lot more efficient using v3.
Given YouTubes recent adblockblocking moves, it's reasonable to infer that it is in fact to prevent ad blocking, enabling delivery of malicious, undesired payloads.
It isn't the manifest version directly that is doing this, just the permissions/api changes that are happening at the same time. Firefox for example is keeping the old style as an option while still implementing support for MV3 and the declarative option:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi...Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3.
v3's has declarative blocking/redirecting of things vs v2's read/write access to all network requests on any page.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/migrating/block...Manifest V3 changes how extensions handle modification of network requests. Instead of intercepting network requests and altering them at runtime with chrome.webRequest, your extension specifies rules that describe actions to perform when a given set of conditions is met. Do this using the Declarative Net Request API.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/manifest/de...Using declarativeNetRequest, you can block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, providing more privacy.
As a user of their service, rather than a developer of ads or their service, it isn't incumbent on me to care about their approach. Rather, it is incumbent on me to exercise caveat emptor, and understand that Google has both exercised nefariously in prior activities and that ads are how they choose to make revenue. Ergo, trust is low.
This is roughly the equivalent of taking a heuristic malware blocker and making it depend solely on file names or file checksums. I can't prove it, but I feel like it's only the first shoe dropping.