Chrome users beware: Manifest v3 is deceitful and threatening

TIL that there is this whole Degoogle movement.

I luv muh privacy as much as the next guy. But the posters to the Reddit sub of that movement come off sounding "emotion-driven" at best. Conspiracy theory "extremists" at worst.

The impression I get from the Reddit discussion of the eff.org article is that the majority of posters there are not "Hackers". That can be a good thing in a way.

One not-so-good thing, on the other hand, is degoogle posters' apparent unfamiliarity with the nuances sometimes involved in software maintainability decisions.

That plus the confirmation bias that is inevitable in any subreddit.

I'm far from a Google fanboy. Trust me! But being somebody who does code reviews on the regular, I can understand why Google played the "Single purpose" policy constraint card as their rationale for pulling that AdNauseum extension. [0]

From a quick review of the AdNauseum code [1] I can see why Google would say that it does more than one thing.

Case in point: It could be argued that my word processor provides a "Single purpose". Namely: Process words.

But my word processor actually has several discreet functions that I use it for: Mail merges, PDF generation, script and manage macros, etc.

So in that sense, my word processor does not provide a "Single purpose". I could see how Google could apply that to AdNauseum.

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[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20211209223531/https://adnauseam...

[1] https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/

They also removed live bookmarks, a feature I loved since 2002. There is a browser extension now, but I just moved to Inoreader (and Edge).

Final straw was the dedicated search bar not working with keyword shortcuts for other search engines. While the settings page claims those are supposed to work in the address bar and the search bar, they only work in the address ("omni") bar.

Too many features removed. I'd rather just go to my native browser and all the inherent advantages to it at that point, which as mentioned is MS Edge. I love it. In fact, their unnecessary additions (MS Shopping) actually opened my eyes to things I didn't know existed, like the Honey extension. I have no complaints about Microsoft Edge on Windows 11 or iOS. After 19 years of Firefox.

What's DuckDuckGo browser? - That looks like a fake to me.

While I may be the only one around here to not know this, but I didn't realize Brave was OSS all the way through. That's great. I used FF for 19 years and switched to Edge fulltime in August ('21), and never looked back as each browser has its strengths and weaknesses. In the end, other than me being upset with feature removal in FF, I found Edge objectively comes out on top for me.

Vivaldi always seemed to hold the most promise but was buggy for me and still missing strong iOS integration that the competition has in place. Having used FF for so long, I was ready to go to a larger provider. So mainly, MS, Apple, or Google. Native browsers have big advantages so resisting those no longer made sense if I'm making a switch.

But Brave in my testing, did not completely convince me. Reviewing my testing notes-

Brave- no dedicated search bar option (important for privacy / prefetching and not having to continually retype your search query). Didn't get to mobile support and crossplatform sync. No dedicated extension store.

Of course, I had to give up on my dedicated search bar requirement, because FF's has been gimped by Mozilla, and Vivaldi had other unrelated usability flaws. So Edge it has been, and being completely honest, I've been thrilled with it. There's plenty other good here to overlook that and I haven't missed it as much as I thought I would.

All that said, I'm now going to keep Brave in mind, moving it up a notch. I always liked Eich which doesn't hurt. I don't fear a Chromium world, and never used FF because it wasn't, in fact I mostly resented it. I just don't see eye to eye with the anti-Blink crowd.

I think Firefox should've morphed into Brave, rather than be a separate project. A Brave that has Vivaldi's feature set would be perfect. Only thing missing then is major vendor support, and it'll always be non-native on all platforms, but at that point it could be overlooked.

For Firefox to fight its way back will require more than anti-Blink monoculture advocates supporting it. Blink has become the same as the USD, and isn't to be feared. For me, that's like saying you're resisting using the US Dollar because you don't want monoculture. Yet look at how much you can do with the USD. It enables quite a bit, embracing it just enables you to get other things done with less resistance. Users benefit. More important missions are at play. Like perhaps privacy, transparency, both things that Brave clearly focuses on. Or whatever one's chosen priorities are.

I legitimately love MS Edge, and I always keep Tor installed for the best privacy, but Brave is now my #2 pick for a daily driver and will be advocating for it for those that don't want to use their native browser.

The current global rule limit is 300k rules per profile. This is shared between all extensions, which is shared amongst all extensions. This limit comes after the 30k per extension minimum, so if your extension uses 40k rules only 10k count against the global limit.

So if we assume rules are 1-to-1 (and in fact fewer rules should be present in declarativeNetRequest because certain rules like element hiding do not factor into declarativeNetRequest, and would be handled directly by the extension), you could fit ~5 adblocking extensions the size of your basic ublock install, and most of a 6th.

Now there are some advanced capabilities of some adblockers that have no equivalent available, but for common multi-plugin rulesets like EasyList, declaritiveNetRequest will support pretty much everything contained therein, (except cosmetic rules, which the plugin must apply separately, since they are not blocking requests, but modifying the page, which is quite different).