For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
Firefox+uBO works fine. Brave shields works fine.
Ublock was already somewhat neutered on Chrome, and people didn’t seem to notice. They keep using it.
I’m just so cynical these days. It’s not like the Windows XP era, where people eventually get fed up with enshittification, and move.
Google won. Facebook won.
They have absolute control, basically.
Pretty fucked up considering how much malware and scammy bullshit come though ads.
Over 10 years ago someone at my office had their work PC and user drive encrypted with ransomware because of a bad ad injection from one of those job search sites. Thankfully it was limited to nothing critical and incremental backups restore the drive…but hopefully they found a good lead because they were canned.
If they’d had a good ad blocker this would have been a non issue
I work in IT: Pretty much all the malware we deal with comes from ads. I’ve pitched making ad blocking standard but they never go for it, even though it’s clear it would prevent an absolute shit ton of attacks. It’s crazy!
Yep, sorry but not sorry. Advertisements aren’t safe. The industry has been ruined by bad actors and it’s a shame, but also not my problem.
It’s everyone’s problem in a way…
I worked in ads only a few months and learned how fucked that industry was. They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser, sucking as much info as they can. The fact that it hasn’t been regulated to hell is shocking, and truly a failure of all leaders.
It’s because people don’t go into these offices with fire and guns. If a bunch of advertising people were slaughtered every few weeks things may get better.
Same goes for collections, eventually no one will want to do the job.
Honestly, <looks at current governments> not that shocking.
They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser
That’s the crazy thing.
You want to show me an image, maybe an animated gif, and link it to your website where you’re selling shit? Fine. Annoying, but fine.
But I don’t care how many crocodile tears they shed about ‘but websites depend on ad income’ – I am not letting random, unvetted advertisers run arbitrary code on my computer. I don’t care if it’s in a sandbox inside a sandbox. Exploits may be found, sandboxes may be escaped. And there’s plenty of trouble they can get into even within their little sandbox, like running a fucking crypto miner or something.
So, yeah. Adblock and noscript everywhere and always.
Yes, they can host a GIF on their server & show it to me with a non-personalized link, & promote it where they believe the average reader might be interested in it. Or some reader(s).
Just show me the ads you’re showing everybody else, and make money from sales of useful things & services.
It’s not even that hard to have targeted ads while still respecting privacy – just base the targeting on the other content on the page, rather than on the user.
Internet Browsers store way too much data and have waaaay too many permissions. It’s sickening.
not enough, what they want is personal data to mine. they cant do that in simple terms. meta, glassdoor, indeed , linkden,(plaid) tries to use convoluted mehtods to get you to give up more personal data than you normally would in order to access the rest of the site.(glassdoor and indeed has an additional reason to want you ridentiy)
The whole industry is bad actors. The quaint, pastoral idea of actually advertising things you genuinely might want to know about is utterly beyond dead, it died the moment they realized they could use the same pipeline to harvest data and manipulate and control people. Using it for mere advertising is a waste of everyone’s time and resources when they have an option so much more lucrative on the table.
Seriously. If Google really wants to shove ads down our throats, they could at least regulate them so they’re not constantly horny scams. But that would cost them money, oh the humanity.
laughs in Firefox/Librewolf
FF support is getting worse and worse though.
Barely any of the sites I use for work support FF.
Laugh all you want but shit is a bit fucked.
Ladybird is our last best hope and its barely a glimmer.
why would those sites support ladybird if they don’t support firefox?
That isn’t FF support. That is chrome doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by implementing non-standard functionality to abuse their market dominance.
Sure but if devs don’t test sites in Firefox then very they don’t support Firefox.
Wait, what sites don’t work in firefox?
Yet to see one.
I’ve answered this so many times.
Banks, my uni, accounting software I use at work.
Its a well acknowledged and much discussed fact that the web is buggy with ff.
Fun fact: many sites that say that they don’t support firefox lie, their sites usually support it but they never tested it or they deem firefox “less secure” or some bullshit, but with an useragent spoofer, they will work
(Not all sites ofc)
Fun fact: you don’t seem very bright.
By “support FF” I mean “can be used in firefox or a derivative with comparable features to chrome”.
I think you should read my reply again, slowly
I’m not talking about sites that claim not to support FF. I’m talking about sites that have broken features when visited in FF.
Do you have any example? Can you send any link? I never experienced those problems myself so i want to try
Chrome is doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by not following web standards. There are several websites I have used where the payment process or uploading process only worked in chrome.
Again, this is a problem with chrome doing things that breaks consistency between browsers that are supposed to be following the same web standards.
This is very well documented, and a very common experience.
They were talking about exactly this on late night linux podcast just last week.
No worries, play store-recaptcha is coming for you too!
Waiting for another player…
PRESS START TO JOIN
?
affects mobile the most obviously… but google’s playbook is to basically have forced telemetry always and enforce integrity of their telemetry, and by extension advertising etc.
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/07/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement/ - this just seems like an ok article for it, I did a simple web search and it came up, but others certainly exist if you dislike the source.
Looking forward to when they remove the old options & force PC users to scan reCAPTCHA QRs:
Those sites will be dead to me :)
QR codes are like the popups of days gone by. With incredibly few exceptions, I refuse to scan them. They are so easy to redirect for nefarious purposes, and you can’t easily inspect the url to know, assuming thats something you even do. Also my phone case covers the camera and it’s a bitch to get open so I’m very choosy with what gets camera time.
On my phone I use URLCheck (available in f-droid). You set it as your default browser app, but instead of opening a browser, it opens a popup where you can see the URL, and use some useful tools like removing tracking parameters or automatically rewriting x.com to xcancel.com. The rewritten URL can then just be forwarded to your actual browser (or whatever app is set up to handle that particular URL).
I still won’t actually open random qr code URLs though, especially not ones from google.
Thats new. Thank you for the tip. Installed!
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Unfortunately, we’re fighting an uphill battle here.
We’d need government regulation “protecting privacy”, instead they seem all too eager to concede that in a futile effort to " protect the children ".
I doubt SearXNG is going to integrate it lmao, and if they do, someone will fork or i will keep using older versions
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Searching is already dead. Every search results in 200 Ai articles full of bullshit, even Qwant or DuckDuckGo.
The corpo-web died already, y’all are just crying over the scraps.
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
At which point they cease to be your favourites, I hope. There are so many alternatives in that space that only inertia keeps people using the Empire of Evil.
Zen is excellent.
For people who want an opinionated browser… Yes. They have sponsored shortcuts which cannot be disabled and they ghost out the option to in the settings. If you want to dig around the about:config and tweak things, fine, but I’d rather use a browser I can make my own. Librewolf is excellently bare bones.
Never seen those, and did a fresh install recently too. And zen has a lot of customization options, it’s also so damn well designed and is great to use.
Sponsored shortcuts? They don’t have them, i did a clean install only some week ago so i doubt it’s a new thing
I haven’t seen any of those things yet, but I’ll try to keep an eye out. The only one I noticed was a default search engine to Google, but DDG was an easy enough option. I like libre wolf as well, but I’m not a fan of the updating scheme on my system.
Corpo banned it for compatibility with crap code apparently
The MV3 support in firefox is even stricter than in Chrome. I found that chrome will let you sidestep CSP to make an HTTP request. Firefox won’t.
I don’t understand what you found, but firefox still supports the web request blocking API for Mv3 extensions, which is what ublock needs.
I was debugging one of my favourite extensions this week to figure out why it didn’t work on firefox. It hadn’t been updated in years, so something changed in firefox in the last few months.
I assume the Chrome version still works. I’m not installing it.
if it hadn’t been updated in years then it will be an Mv2 extension, irrelevant to discussion of Mv3 strictness.
It was MV3. I had to rewrite the manifest as V2 to get it working.
Who here actually uses these shitass browsers?
I have degoogled Chromium installed because some things only work in a chrome browser. However it’s a special use case and I would barely notice if ublock was gone. I wouldn’t use it as a main browser anyway.
I have to use it at work.
I don’t like it. I doing use it elsewhere, but it’s mandatory.
Here on Lemmy, not many.
Its about 75% of the world though.
Here? We’re a rounding error not worth considering.
The majority of users do not use any web browser. They “click on the internet”.
Me.
I use ungoogled chromium and librewolf, all day every day.
Loada of sites just dont work in FF.
Loada of sites just dont work in FF.
Which ones? I want to see for myself what I’m missing out on.
- my uni’s LMS
- my bank
- the popular accounting software I use at work
- the other accounting software I use at work
- the time tracking software we use
- google maps
- accommodation booking site
that’s just the stuff I can remember for the moment.
Google Maps, Firefox (Zen browser), all extensions still on.
Wow. Did you manage to navigate to a web site like a big boy? I better get the stickers out.
LOL okay, fuck you too then asshole.
Use an extension to spoof your user agent as Chrome and I bet at least some of them magically start working.
LOL
Got some examples?
I think there’s one called user agent switcher.
Websites that magically work when you change UA.
Basically everyone who’s not a techy person (unless their PC was set up by someone who is I suppose).
Any PC I assist with has FF/UBO when I walk away. Now I have to strip out the AI shit too. So maybe I walk away with Waterfox on there now. Librewolf is too much for the average folk.
Tip: if you install Firefox from scratch frequently, you should build a custom
user.jswhere you disable all the stuff you don’t like, and then just drop the file in the profile directory with a script, instead of manually going through all the settings pages each time.Not having tried either, could you please summarize the differences?
That’s not completely true. I’ve had a fling with Vivaldi for a long time, but only for casual browsing on bookmarked sites I visit regularly (think forums, etc), but for anything serious, it’s obviously Firefox only.
I always liked Vivaldi a lot, but I guess it’s about breakup time. It’s a damn ducking shame.
You’d be hard pressed to find someone who thinks I’m not a “techy” person either, considering I’ve been building them since the early pentium era.
For posterity, I can mention that Opera and then Vivaldi were the first two “not IE” browsers I ever switched to for myself. Got in some trouble as my parents thought that I "had deleted the Internet, their exact words…)
Those were the days, heh.
Yeah and to be fair my main browser is Zen but I still have chrome and edge because I work on websites and need to make sure things work OK, they’re just not used for much else.
the average person on lemmy probably cares more about privacy than the average internet dweller.
The average internet dweller doesn’t even know they’ve lost privacy.
after all, their post has a delete button next to it and their messages say private! They wouldn’t just lie
Where do their messages still say private? I’ve not seen that in years. The initialism “PM” seemed to get replaced by “DM” overnight. Also though, many of them didn’t lose privacy. Anyone, at the very least in USA, younger than the Patriot Act never had privacy to begin with.
100%
Even many, many lemmy users believe there is a semblance of privacy on the internet today, or in national businesses with modern IP camera tech. It’s all gone.
They have enough telemetry to know who you are between all the details the browser gives them. Hell, most people don’t even know what a tracking pixel is or how it has been used for well over a decade.
We’re at the point with machine learning that the resources required to process all of these datapoints is trivial even when done onboard fairly cheap devices.
I worked on ad stuff for a very short time where they could tell if they showed you an ad a year ago, and another one, and then if you went to a store, that it was all connected. They would know if you went into a store with presence detection that their ad was working.
Zen still works beautifully. The only downside I’ve come across is that there isn’t a mobile app, so the ability to hand off isn’t there.
Google realized how much money they were losing by supporting adblock in the first place. They also had way too many extensions with MV2 that requested full site access…
At the end of the day, they want to force feed everyone advertisements. Often meant to make people angry or buy shit they don’t need.
It’s also why apps like NewPipe are in an arms race with the recent sideloading app changes for Android.
Inspired by the Ludovico Technique
Embrace Zen
So LibreWolf browser it is?
Yeah, thats what I use with uBlock for Youtube. I can’t get Invidious to be stable enough.
Just about any firefox derivative will do now.
I have liked waterfox.
waterfox is my go-to these days too
people still use chrome?, with all thier bs with adblocking and incognito like almost 7 years ago.
Laughs in Firefox based browsers
Excellent reason for even the normies to ditch chrome 🥂
Cue the Brave shills “recommending” to switch to Brave in 5…4…3…
Wait what’s wrong with Brave?
Nothing.
It’s not firefox
Firefox doesn’t have tab groups on mobile
You may have a browsing addiction if you need tab groups on mobile, wow…
I swear I hate tabbed browsing, because it leads to people hording tabs like a freaking squirrel hordes nuts.
If you need it for later, book mark it.
If you’re done with it close it.
Bookmarks in mobile Firefox is another issue. Bookmark management is a massive chore. I end up keeping tabs around a lot longer in mobile just to avoid messing with it.
On desktop Firefox with the Bookmark Tab Here extension (native functionality I missed from Chrome), bookmarking and organizing a new page is just two clicks. I use that workflow extensively. Apparently I have over 7000 bookmarks all organized that way.
7000 bookmarks
… Whoa… of what, out of morbid curiosity?
I’ve started using Karakeep for this. If I haven’t used a tab in a while but want it to stick around, throw it to Karakeep, let ai tag it, then close that tab.
This doesn’t work when I have memory issues. That tab is open as part of my external system of memory for myself so I know what I was trying to do before one of my several issues prevented me finishing.
Those are my emotional support ‘∞ tabs’, thank-you very much.
I might need them.
“People don’t use their browsers how I want REEEE!!!”
Added to nightly somewhat recently.
It’s still not pushed out to phones. I’m going to keep shit talking them until it’s actually out, because they’ve spent far too much time stringing them along
“Firefox doesn’t have this one feature I like so I will keep using browser made by an ad company. I’m sure there will be no consequences long term”.
Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin
“Oh shit. No one could have predicted this!”.
Firefox dragged its feet on an extremely useful feature for years.
Are you seriously trying to act like Firefox hasn’t been continually shooting themselves in the foot the past decade?
I’ve been using Firefox for decades without issues. Yes, Chrome was a better browser for a long time but Firefox wasn’t that far behind and was absolutely fine browser to use.
Do you really think Mozilla could win browser race with Google, the fucking second biggest company in the world? Of course Chrome had more features, it had basically unlimited resources at it disposal. But yeah, let’s blame Mozilla for not winning with them decisively.
YOU are shooting yourself in the foot. You abandoned Firefox for couple of features and soon you will be browsing the web with ads. Come back and tell me how extremely useful Chrome’s features are when can you no longer skip Youtube ads.
Hey dumbass, you remember how Mozilla decided to use Google’s Play Integrity API for their Android browser?
Mozilla is cooperating in fucking all of us over.
Firefox is already using Google’s Play Integrity API. They don’t give a shit about us, they’re helping Google fuck everyone over.
While Firefox itself can still be installed and used on rooted or non-certified Android devices, some AI-powered features may not be available on those platforms.
Yeah, that’s not a real issue for me. Is it for you?
I would argue that if you’re choosing between chrome and brave, brave is still better.
Brave has a certain distasteful reputation earned by repeated unethical fuckery. If you are fine with what brave does, you have no reason to avoid chrome in the first place.
Sure. Probably. But why are we choosing between Chrome and Brave?
For a lot of people, it’s an easy transition.
DDG, Vivaldi, etc. harder transitions.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
I’m just saying perfect is the enemy of good.
What sites are those?
Websites that are actively malicious against firefox, that miraculously work when you have a useragent plugin that makes firefox report that its chrome proving that the site works fine, if the asshole code is removed?
I think this is when @AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com will discreetly not answer or otherwise avoid mentioning the exact websites… (Because there are none)
Yup mostly because I don’t care anymore. You’re all stating the, “it works on my machine” mantra and I don’t care. See my other comments for some examples.
calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right
Sir, 2000s called and asked you to return this argument back.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
Very difficult to believe. I have had issues with Firefox over the years but in every sing[e instance it was a resu[t of my custom setup. The browser has no major compatibility issues out of the box. I think it’s way more likely your parents are technologically illiterate and confuse other problems or gaps in their knowledge as issues with the “new” thing (in this case, the browser).
Change the icon on the desktop to the chrome pinwheel and they’ll never know the difference.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
Sorry, what? If they are so tech-illiterate that they have to call you and ask why the website is not working, then what kind of web sites are they visiting?
Been using FF since 2022 and the only sites that wont work are the ones that utilizes HID. Are your parents trying to flash custom firmware for their phones though browser every third day?
Good for you. I’ve been in tech for over 16 years and FF absolutely does not work well on ~25% of websites.
Been in tech longer then that (if for some reason we are doing that now) and I will officially call bullshit on that claim.
Wanna link those websites so we can see?
Wait, really? The access cripplers are crazily powerful add-ons for the paranoid, like NoScript, not the browser itself. Like what example websites, specifically?
I get it that tech people stumble upon these sites much more often than non-techies. My point was that if your parents are having website issues every other day (which implies they are not tech-savvy), then why would they even visit sites that are not FF-compatible. How many sites out of all the web do you think are not compatible with FF? Give an example of a normie site that wont work well with FF.
On the other hand, if your parents are tech-savvy then why would they ask you why a website wont load properly? Do you get it that your statement counters itself?
After seeing all the people talking about Vivaldi in this thread I figured I’d try it out…got to the “Panel” setup page, saw there’s one for reddit, maybe I’ll try adding lemmy.zip…
Failed Cloudflare check in panel, but it worked in a tab…okay, weird.
Thought about checking out Kagi since now privacy is on my mind…the front page would reload every 5 seconds so I couldn’t read about it. It’d say “Verification failed please try again” and refresh.
Apparently this has been an issue with Vivaldi for some time? I guess this is the future of the web? You try to escape the claws of these giant internet powerhouses and they just…don’t let you?
It’s true, unfortunately. Not every 3 days, but once a month I encount these sites.
On iOS you can go on pornhub on brave and it blocks all the ads and cookie popups.
That’s one reason that uh… “someone” might use brave.
Orion also blocks ads on iOS and isn’t backed by Thiel, run by Eich or an ad business startup masquerading as an ad blocking browser.
Is a two party system not capable of approptiately responding to the needs of the people within it?
Because Firefox is a different engine and might not work well with certain websites.
My real issue is as a dev of a web application, using Firefox makes things occasionally render differently. It’s only once in a blue moon but enough to make me just accept using Vivaldi to be closer to the defacto user experience. And then I can’t be bothered to switch between FF (I use Zen) and Vivaldi and split my bookmarks, extensions, logins etc. it just doesn’t make sense.
I’ve only ever encountered one website where Firefox didnt work.
and that was because the website was coded maliciously to reject firefox… a plugin to make it think firefox was chrome and suddenly it ran fine.
Well I did, the Amazon Prime Video has many weird behaviors on Firefox compared to the Chromium engine, even YouTube used to have before.
Any web developer knows it isn’t as simple as “code once, work everywhere”. If companies don’t test on Firefox (which is a reality nowadays given its small market share) bugs happen in very weird and unusual ways.
Only issue I’ve ever had with Amazon Video was the fact they artificially limit resolution to 320p for people on linux, regardless of browser.
Firefox doesn’t support WebHID, so I can forget about configuring my custom keyboard with anything other than a Chromium based browser.
Keyboard setup would be a system level setting, no?
Couldn’t use just set the user agent?
People entirely blind to the idea that they can just choose something else instead of 2 piles of shit, one of which has a cherry on top and was sprayed with perfume recently.
Its like some sort of awful american tradition at this point.
It is also chromium based, so stands to get the same nerf.
Yeap, just a matter of time.
Nope, Shields are built into the browser itself, not as an extension which uses those APIs. [1]
Brave is by a company who’s in the business of serving ads.
Much like google was back in the day, they’re trying to obtain market share with a product that they can easily manipulate after the fact and rely on people not jumping ship as things get progressively worse and worse bit by bit
Think of the “approved ads” era followed by the “enhanced security features” which made it so your block list couldn’t be updated at a moments notice and now it’s being stripped entirely.
Better to avoid it entirely and just use Firefox or a derivative thereof
What’s to stop the developers of a Chromium fork like Cromite from mainting MV2 compatibility themselves?
Cromite’s only flaw (IMO) is that it based it’s built in adblocker on AdBlock instead of Ublock.
I’ve tried moving to Firefox and I don’t know, it just feels ugh to me. (scientific critique, I know…). It’s just something I can’t put my finger on; Firefox just doesn’t feel performative. whether that’s a frame-buffer animation thing, or icon shadows, or something else entirely, it just feels off to me in some uncally valley sort of way.
