506
4 browsers that will continue to support uBlock Origin and other ad blockers with Manifest V2
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
506 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59373 readers
8083 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hardly surprising considering that Brave, Vivaldi and Edge are all based on Chromium. The Brave and Vivaldi team won't have the resources to maintain Manifest v2 support for each new Chromium version, and Microsoft doesn't have any reason to support v2 with Edge outside of goodwill.
They are just giving some time for the waters to calm a bit, and then say that it is taking too much effort.
Yup. And perhaps even hoping they can pick up a few users from Chrome when it drops support.
i don't know why people are so allergic to firefox but it is the answer.
its the only halfway decent answer. install firefox and switch to it.
Vivaldi just has better features than Firefox. I'll switch to Firefox when Vivaldi is forced to switch to V3 but until then I'm gonna continue to enjoy Vivaldi
Curios, what sets Vivaldi apart so much in features that makes it hard to switch to Firefox?
Tab stacks and mouse gestures are the 2 that I use the most, that don't exist in Firefox. Tab hibernation is also extremely useful, but I don't know if that exists in Firefox.
And in general there are so many useful tools, like bookmarking by stack and/or window etc.
Their website lists many of the main features.
Basically because in the later year, the development of firefox took very curious directions, from trying to break some decades old, standard feature (only to revert when gmail users, of all things, complained en masse), to integrating many useless extensions (pocket anyone?) that you can't remove and that are more and more difficult to disable. To say nothing of the occasional advertisement for irrelevant products. Basically, even if it's on a smaller scale, using firefox today is starting to look like using windows: you have to fight it on every update to remove something they bork.
And I'm not even talking about the shit that happens at their mother business, Mozilla.
All of this is even more infuriating, because they could very easily not do it and still pursue their venture. Have Firefox, the web browser, be a thing, and have all the shit actually packaged as a separate extension. Heck, even sell or promote it as "Firefox+" or whatever. Just, don't break the core feature to add "smart bookmarks" or whatever VPN ads.
are ads and 24/7 surveillance not worse than this though? and all of googles questionable business practices they do not only on chrome but all of their products? i think the choice is clear here. perfect doesnt have to be the enemy of better.
"worse" is debatable, but they certainly are an issue.
However, that doesn't make it ok in Firefox either. Having a good reputation does not mean you can burn it away by trying your best to look the same as the bad guy you're supposed to fight. Firefox mobile, for a very plain and simple example, have stuff like "future experiment" and telemetry enabled by default. Sure, I can disable them, but they should either be disabled by default, or have a one-time popup that provides the option on the first launch.
My position is that if a piece of software becomes increasingly intrusive and tedious to use with each "update", it's time to look somewhere else. Whether it's Firefox, Chrome, or even OS like Windows. Having to fight back to get to a decent, usable state means that it's no longer the right tool for you.
Fortunately, some people are doing the heavy lifting by providing what would be considered "vanilla" firefox with some good forks, as far as being a browser goes.
I love Firefox, used to use it all the time. Now it's slower on Ubuntu than Brave. I mean slow as in irritating to use, click and wait.
thats probably because you are using the snap version of firefox canonical is pushing.
a big reason why i want to ditch ubuntu.
Linux mint exists, switch and never look back. They just released version 22 and it's probably the best version of mint I've ever used. Switch to mint and use flatpaks instead.
Then something must be wrong with the way you configured your OS.
umbrella at lemmy.ml wrote:
To which I offered a possible answer. Does everyone have misconfigured operating systems?
The Best Web Browsers of 2024 | HighSpeedInternet.com
Yep, I'd probably be wasting my time going down the uninstall-reinstall rabbit hole and would probably not find speed increases.
I came back to Firefox this spring after probably 12 years, or how long is Chrome around and I must say everything works with it, it is snappy, doesn't bog down my memory and has great extensions even on Android. I don't look back to Chrome. It was great in the beginning and got more convoluted as the time progressed. With switching to Firefox i feel like when switched to Chrome back in the day.
The answer is more than one, because Firefox has several forks of its own, and as far as I know all of them (even Pale Moon, which is highly divergent and never supported Manifest V2) support uBlock.
I agree that all Chromium-based browsers are going to drop support sooner or later.
Does Firefox use “manifest v2”? When reading all the frothing news about this stuff, I assumed the “manifest” thing was a Chromium thing.
Firefox will support Manifest v3. However Mozilla will be implementing Manifest 3 differently so the routes Ublock and other extensions use to maintain privacy and block ads will still be available. Firefox will support both the original route and the new limited option Google is forcing on Chromium.
Googles implementation deliberately locks out extensions by removing something called WebRequest, supposedly for security reasons but almost certainly actually for commercial reasons as they are not a neutral party. Google is a major ad and data broker.
Apple will apparently also be adopting the same approach for Safari as Mozilla is for Firefox.
If I remember correctly, yes. There was a pain in the ass a few years ago when Firefox switched from their own add-on system to one that matched Chrome's, despite Firefox's being more powerful and mature. The goal was to make it easier to port Chromes (arguably) greater variety of add-ons to Firefox.
It was an unpopular decision and it was the start of a downward decline for Firefox. People that had their browser "just the way I like it" found themselves starting fresh essentially, and without some of their favourite add-ons.
Damn. That means they are once again on a divergent path.
How so? They can support Manifest v2 and v3 simultaneously. It's a bit harder for their old add-on system since that add-on system had more hooks into the browser, but v3 is largely just a restriction, so there won't be much conflict there.
Ah, if it’s easy to just maintain both, and v3 is largely backwards compatible then I’m mistaken on how divergent v3 is.
Defanged/declawed v3 is a weird thing to have exist. It’s a bummer that Chrome got to set the standard. And then they took that and restricted things. This isn’t a healthy standard.
If FF ever drops V3, it'll be because they have extensions to bring parity to V2. There is maintenance overhead, but I doubt it's anywhere close to the old add-on vs V2 differences.
Vivaldi does a lot of adblocking natively, and they are maintaining V2 as long as they can, which based on info from Google is summer 2025 but might change.
Will the Vivaldi Ad Blocker be affected by the Manifest V3 changes? I made some architectural choices early on that I believe should keep it functional, regardless of the Manifest V3 changes.
Not arguing, just adding context from their blog.