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.
good thing i use brave,i recommend everyone to use it it has great adblocker that wont be affected by mv3.
Lynx gang, assemble
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
It’s everyone’s problem in a way…
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
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.
…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 ".
…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.
…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.
I doubt SearXNG is going to integrate it lmao, and if they do, someone will fork or i will keep using older versions
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!
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.
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.
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.
Sponsored shortcuts? They don’t have them, i did a clean install only some week ago so i doubt it’s a new thing
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.
Corpo banned it for compatibility with crap code apparently
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.
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.
why would those sites support ladybird if they don’t support firefox?
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.
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.
Who here actually uses these shitass browsers?
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.
Not having tried either, could you please summarize the differences?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here? We’re a rounding error not worth considering.
The majority of users do not use any web browser. They “click on the internet”.
I have to use it at work.
I don’t like it. I doing use it elsewhere, but it’s mandatory.
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.
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.
Here on Lemmy, not many.
Its about 75% of the world though.
In other words, it won’t affect me or most of the people who use uBlock.
And people still use these trash dumpster of a browser?
I see a lot of comments (justifiably) touting firefox’s superiority… but the performance difference is night and day.
My main pc has very weak hardware, and my browser is the most resource intensive application I run. In my environment, I can’t leave firefox open with other heavy apps running simultaneously, but I can leave chrome open.
I’ve used firefox for decades in the past, but the gap is huge and it doesn’t look like Mozilla will make the engine changes necessary to close it. Idk if things have changed, but I remember when they axed the Servo team.
I’ve been using Ungoogled Chromium and I’m hoping this doesn’t affect me for a while… but if I have to choose between ads and closing my browser to run heavy apps, I guess I’ll be reinstalling firefox.
Even if all of this is true, I would rather have uBlock Origin and worse performance.
same, chromium is much faster on a core2duo…
my boss (of 20+ years) abuses an old core2duo era desktop (8gb ram and sata ssd, both upgrades from original specs when 10 was put on) with 150+ tab firefox plus word and excel and voice software all going at once. never shuts down, never closes an application. sleeps, wakes, hibernates on weekends. it just keeps going. she’s never had any problems and it runs really well. she’d be bitching if it didn’t.
Brave and Vivaldi have built-in ad blockers. Brave’s is based on uBO; Vivaldi’s is based on ABP.
Brave should not be recommended under any light. Telemetry, their own advertising, crypto, data mining, etc. I used it for some time and I do not recommend it.
And uBlock will work on Vivaldi until it is absolutely blocked in the chromium core.
Performance night and day? I don’t think so lol. I daily Firefox. It works fine.
And even if it didn’t and it was slower… I’ll take slower over all those fucking shit ads
Yeah, of course ads aren’t an option, but ungoogled chromium still supports mv2 for now and I can’t watch a youtube video and play a video game at the same time with firefox on my machine…
Granted, I’m probably trying to make inadequate hardware do more than it should, but chromium works and I don’t want to upgrade my hardware right now.
Now this in curious about. Why can’t you do both at once?
I daily game with Firefox and dozens of tabs open. Granted in using Linux.
Youtube is especially egregious. I’ve tried various hardware acceleration settings and h264ify but it really brings my pc to its knees.
Im on linux, and when I run my windows vm (qemu kvm) with either Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, or Fusion 360 in it, firefox on my host machine runnimg youtube just barely pushes it over the edge.
I absolutely recognize how wild what I’m asking this little computer to do is, but I can just get away with it in chromium but not firefox (since the last time I checked)
The day I can do it all with firefox I will be a happy camper
Edit: also, I specifically said games but didn’t name one… FFXIV and Deadlock both crash if I’m running youtube in chrome (and Discord at the same time).
I play elden ring, nightreign, harry Potter Hogwarts legacy, doom 2016 and eternal and a whole bunch of other shit. No issues.
Also use YouTube. No issues.
Are you using open source video drivers perhaps?
I’m using an AMD APU, so just the regular mesa drivers.
The last time I had issues was about a year and a half ago, and I switched to Brave, but a year later (5 months ago) I was convinced to give Ungoogled Chromium another chance by someone here on lemmy (because of all the controversy surrounding Brave).
In the past I always used firefox because its customization features are so much richer, settings werent intrinsically tied to google (or amputated like in ungoogled), and the source code is more comprehensible (firefox is so neatly organized and easy to build yourself, and chromium is a giant mess under the hood).
I really want to use firefox again… maybe I’ll get a dell precision tower off ebay and shove a cheap old nvidia card in it with the proprietary drivers to solve my problems 😅
I’ve been on nvidia forever at this point. Personally looking forward to getting back to AMD next time around. They are more open with their drivers. You should try the AMD proprietary drivers instead.
Not sure what your daily browsing is like but Firefox is notably slower across numerous sites than Chrome. And absolutely non-functional for some sites for me.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I use Firefox as much as damn near possible. But that’s maybe…50% of sites with parity and 25% more if I’m OK with a degraded experience.
I’m curious to know. I mean, I typically have dozens and dozens of tabs open and never shut my computer off. Curious what these numerous sites are, you’re the only one that can attest to that.
Bill pay sites, banking sites, news sites, intranet sites.
I was being generous in FF favor with 25% because I truly love it and use it even with the issues, but it is a daily problem for me for sure.
And this is across two laptops, a desktop, a Linux system, and my phone.
Strange. No issue here in shitty windows 11 on a lenovo laptop or on my 2019 desktop running Linux. Similar site usage, and some sites I use are using 1GB of RAM each.
But which are these specific sites, as in some exact domains? Why are you avoiding naming them?
See my other comments, I’ve named some and given examples.
Mozilla thought it would be a great idea to install AI features in Firefox and that brilliant decision may be causing your issue. Those AI features use an absurd amount of resources on some websites and when they’re enabled on my laptop, FF regularly shows ~50% CPU.
When all that BS is turned off CPU use drops to less than 2% most of the time. Search for “AI Controls” in settings and try shutting them all off.
I did my testing before the AI features were implemented, and I tested a variety of custom profile settings for firefox and custom chrome flags for a variety of chrome based browsers…
Granted, I was using benchmarks, but the differences are somewhere around 15-30% on my machine on Arch
Interesting running those… Haven’t had to worry about benchmarks on my system, both Chrome and FF are plenty fast. I do wonder how the performance of Chrome with ads would compare to Firefox with the same ads blocked? Every once in a while I use some one else’s computer and can’t believe how many animated ads show up on pages I frequent.
Do you just put up with the ads or block them another way?
Have you tried tweaking user.js?
I don’t trust at all that that setting stops AI features from using resources. They even go out of their way to say the features are ‘blocked’ instead of something more confidence-inducing like removed or uninstalled.
I don’t feel bad for people who whine about “well, I have to go into the settings and change a thing”. How much did you pay for that browser again? Complacency is what keeps people in abusive ecosystems. Don’t be complacent or you’re part of the problem.
I don’t feel bad for people who whine about “well, I have to go into the settings and change a thing”. How much did you pay for that browser again? Complacency is what keeps people in abusive ecosystems. Don’t be complacent or you’re part of the problem.
I’m having trouble making any sense of your word salad. Are you triggered because someone dared criticize a bonehead move by Mozilla, or are you upset that anyone’s using Firefox’s “abusive ecosystem” in the first place? Neither? Both?
Firefox has lost nearly all of their users and now has less than 4% of the market. Adding a “feature” that makes computers virtually unusable without any indication as to why is yet another reason that’s happened. Nevertheless, if poor implementation of a feature makes for an “abusive ecosystem” it means that by your definition all software is part of an abusive ecosystem.
the performance difference is night and day
People say this, but… performance for what? To show us ads?
I’d much rather take the slightly-lower-performance browser that doesn’t show ads. My brain cycles count as performance too.
Performance like opening a link crashes another application like my vms or cad applications or VS or a game. The performance differences are relatively minor, but it really matters on crappy hardware
Has anyone notice safari letting youtube ads through on iOS recently? (I also use AdGuard DNS on my phone, so I guess that’s stopped working too)
Good thing I don’t use any of those shitty browsers.
Remember back in the day when you’d see these little badges on websites saying Best viewed with Internet Explorer? And some sites just wouldn’t work right on other browsers?
Soon you went be using any of those shitty sites, either
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
I just got a notification today, that I can not continue using my banking app on my phone without first registering with the government… dark days for privacy.
uBlock Origin Light works fine. In fact I prefer it for the most part. They should have found better ways to provide the exact same features in MV3 though even if that meant additional warnings or prompts. I get why declarative requests provide more privacy and safety, but there will always be power users who’d rather have more choice.
People keep mentioning Firefox but fail to realize that Google, as the sole sponsor of Mozilla Corporation (not to be confused with Mozilla Foundation), can just kindly ask for Firefox to follow suit and gimp itself, just like it did before with a move to webextensions. Gotta admit it, Google has won the web, what they say (eventually) goes.
