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“UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

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Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#11

Post by staticassertion »

kibwen wrote: post #5
fezfight wrote: post #3

How many people use adblockers? Is there any chance manifest v3 will lead to enough users abandoning Googles Chrome to build a community around an open alternative, like we did when we abandoned IE for Firefox all those years ago?

Adblockers are an existential threat to Google. If any appreciable percentage of the population started using a browser that allowed adblockers, Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and Reddit, and...) would do everything within their power to block that browser from all the web properties they control (this is not an exaggeration: everything within their power , because the alternative is the death of their entire bus…

Adblockers might be an existential threat to Google, but MV3 won't change anything for Google. Google AdSense ads will almost certainly still get blocked, they're not hard to block/ obfuscated.

I really doubt this will change anything for Google with regards to ads. At most you can argue that this is "step 1" in a larger plan to eventually bypass these adblockers or something, which I'll totally buy, but V3 has gotten better at blocking ads over time, not worse.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#12

Post by tapoxi »

driverdan wrote: post #4

If you're still using Chrome now is the time to switch to Firefox. This is an interesting experiment but the only solution is to stop using Chrome.

You can also use Brave, which implements its own native adblocker and isn't impacted by Manifest v3.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#14

Post by dilap »

driverdan wrote: post #4

If you're still using Chrome now is the time to switch to Firefox. This is an interesting experiment but the only solution is to stop using Chrome.

First time in a while running Firefox on Mac, and I'm happy to report it finally supports bounce scrolling! In general scrolling is very smooth and performance seems excellent.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#15

Post by shadowgovt »

vbezhenar wrote: post #8
fezfight wrote: post #3

How many people use adblockers? Is there any chance manifest v3 will lead to enough users abandoning Googles Chrome to build a community around an open alternative, like we did when we abandoned IE for Firefox all those years ago?

The question is: how many people will miss manifest v2 options. I'm using adblocker written by myself. It's pretty primitive, it uses declarative blocking by URLs and optionally inserts some CSS and JS to selected websites. So far I was able to solve all my ads issues with this approach.

I'm a little surprised Google hasn't seen more pushback from enterprise. I'd expect the weirdest uses of broad permissions to be on intranets, where the inherent risks of such breadth can be mitigated by controlling the accessed data itself. I'm comparing the situation to one of the things that kept Flash on life support for so long: it had been used to build key internal and external tools for fortune-500 companies that they needed time to replace.

That Google hasn't seen such pushback suggests to me that corps writing their own extensions for internal use never caught on like Flash did.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#16

Post by shadowgovt »

staticassertion wrote: post #11
kibwen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adblockers are an existential threat to Google. If any appreciable percentage of the population started using a browser that allowed adblockers, Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and Reddit, and...) would do everything within their power to block that browser from all the web properties they control (this is not an exaggeration: everything within their power , because the alternative is the death of their entire bus…

Adblockers might be an existential threat to Google, but MV3 won't change anything for Google. Google AdSense ads will almost certainly still get blocked, they're not hard to block/ obfuscated. I really doubt this will change anything for Google with regards to ads. At most you can argue that this is "step 1" in a larger plan to eventually bypass these adblockers or something, which I'll totally buy, but V3 has gotte…

From Google's point of view, they generally use "How many people are running adblockers" as just another quality signal on whether the ads are actually working as intended. Google doesn't really care if a little under half the users on the web block them.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#17

Post by antonok »

staticassertion wrote: post #11
kibwen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adblockers are an existential threat to Google. If any appreciable percentage of the population started using a browser that allowed adblockers, Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and Reddit, and...) would do everything within their power to block that browser from all the web properties they control (this is not an exaggeration: everything within their power , because the alternative is the death of their entire bus…

Adblockers might be an existential threat to Google, but MV3 won't change anything for Google. Google AdSense ads will almost certainly still get blocked, they're not hard to block/ obfuscated. I really doubt this will change anything for Google with regards to ads. At most you can argue that this is "step 1" in a larger plan to eventually bypass these adblockers or something, which I'll totally buy, but V3 has gotte…

> V3 has gotten better at blocking ads over time, not worse.

That may be true, but it's still significantly limited compared to MV2. And at the current rate, that is unlikely to change by the time Manifest V2 support is removed.

What's important is that MV3 adblocker developers no longer have full control over how they're allowed to modify pages. Given how adversarial the relationship between adblockers and websites is, that lack of control will be exploited almost immediately.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#18

Post by staticassertion »

shadowgovt wrote: post #15
vbezhenar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: how many people will miss manifest v2 options. I'm using adblocker written by myself. It's pretty primitive, it uses declarative blocking by URLs and optionally inserts some CSS and JS to selected websites. So far I was able to solve all my ads issues with this approach.

I'm a little surprised Google hasn't seen more pushback from enterprise. I'd expect the weirdest uses of broad permissions to be on intranets, where the inherent risks of such breadth can be mitigated by controlling the accessed data itself. I'm comparing the situation to one of the things that kept Flash on life support for so long: it had been used to build key internal and external tools for fortune-500 companies…

That's an interesting point, but I think it may also speak to the fact that v3 isn't that restrictive other than for very specific use cases.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#19

Post by googlryas »

kibwen wrote: post #5
fezfight wrote: post #3

How many people use adblockers? Is there any chance manifest v3 will lead to enough users abandoning Googles Chrome to build a community around an open alternative, like we did when we abandoned IE for Firefox all those years ago?

Adblockers are an existential threat to Google. If any appreciable percentage of the population started using a browser that allowed adblockers, Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and Reddit, and...) would do everything within their power to block that browser from all the web properties they control (this is not an exaggeration: everything within their power , because the alternative is the death of their entire bus…

Are they? I see ad blocker ads on YouTube all the time. Presumably google would block them if they were a real threat.

Re: “UBO Minus (MV3)” – An Experimental uBlock Origin Build for Manifest V3

#20

Post by antonok »

shadowgovt wrote: post #15
vbezhenar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: how many people will miss manifest v2 options. I'm using adblocker written by myself. It's pretty primitive, it uses declarative blocking by URLs and optionally inserts some CSS and JS to selected websites. So far I was able to solve all my ads issues with this approach.

I'm a little surprised Google hasn't seen more pushback from enterprise. I'd expect the weirdest uses of broad permissions to be on intranets, where the inherent risks of such breadth can be mitigated by controlling the accessed data itself. I'm comparing the situation to one of the things that kept Flash on life support for so long: it had been used to build key internal and external tools for fortune-500 companies…

Google actually is allowing MV2 extensions to work under enterprise policy for much longer than anyone else: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/mv2-sunset/
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