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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

#111
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?

It really depends on the platform and target audience.

For example for a website I manage that targets PC gamers, 80-90% desktop users use adblockers. On mobile however the majority settles for chrome (which intentionally doesn't support extensions to avoid adblockers), therefore most mobile users don't have adblockers.

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

#112
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why you'd switch to an iPhone over a web browser? iPhone is a huge step back for having an open browser with user focused extensions. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios

I know it's Safari under the hood, but Brave on iOS is great. I do hope that Apple decides to / is forced to allow real 3rd party browsers at some point, though. I also hope that a decent Linux phone becomes a realistic alternative. I'll check back in 10 years to see if either of those materializes.

Probably more like one year. The DMA just passed (I think? I don't follow too closely)

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

#113
post #69
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

42.7% of internet users worldwide (16-64 years old) use ad blocking tools at least once a month. That framing sets of multiple mental alarm bells. EDIT: it looks like the source is HootSuite may have a conflict of interest, as they seem to focus on social media advertising campaigns.

What does it even mean to use an ad blocking tool "at least once a month"? Like... do people have an ad blocker installed, but disabled most of the time, and just enable it temporarily when they come across a site with particularly egregious ads? That seems... an unlikely use model?

It means they only use an adblocker on desktop.

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

#114
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 43% number is huge imo. A large quantity of devices either cannot install adblock (or cannot do so easily) such as "smart" tvs. Even to install on Android Firefox it took more effort than I expected.

It seems the actual number is 43% of those surveyed use an ad blocking tool at least once a month, so a lot of those may only have their ad blocker installed on their PC, plus the bias that comes from only having the answers of those who responded to the survey

Still that’s a fairly overwhelming number of people who feel strongly enough about the topic to install a plug-in. I’m sure there’s a portion of ‘no’ responses that are not aware of what adblockers are or do

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

#115
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those who care about this are already on Firefox I don't think that's true. Many, many more people would care immensely if they were suddenly deprived of good adblocking on Chrome.

> if they were suddenly deprived of good adblocking on Chrome. Ok - but that won't happen (at least not yet, given the m3 api available, who knows what google will do long term). The majority of users won't genuinely notice any difference between an adblocker running on m3 vs m2, and plenty of companies are going to make them. My point is that despite the push back from the UBO dev (and I sort of agree - this does li…

"The majority of users won't genuinely notice any difference between an adblocker running on m3 vs m2"

I think that'll be true for a short time. But once the advertisers figure out that ad blockers have been crippled on the most popular browser...

They'll figure out how to take advantage of that.

Once Chrome takes away the ability to do live heuristics, and leaves you with just a static-ish blacklist, it's pretty easy to get around the ad blocker.

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

#116
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If uBlock doesn't provide a compatible extension or if their extension is worse than possible I'd likely just switch to the best alternative which will pop-up. I imagine most users will do the same.

Why are you willing to accept an inferior adblocker, instead of switching to another browser that maintains support for fully featured adblockers?

Until recently, Firefox was an inferior browser, at least on macOS where it did a bad job of fitting native UI conventions, had a much less secure sandbox than Chrome, and was also behind in performance. Seems like things have improved on all of those fronts, so perhaps it's time to take another look. (That said, I've only ever used Chrome as a secondary browser for certain sites – my current primary one is Orion – so I have less incentive to experiment.)

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

#117

Just so I understand correctly: This version removes *all* of the features that read or modify a user's data, so as to abide by the ""stated intent"" of MV3, rather than taking full advantage of all of the actual MV3 APIs? For example, this commit removes the "scriplet injection" and cosmetic filtering features, which AFAIK work perfectly fine on MV3? if broad "read/modify data" permission is to be used, than there i…

> this commit removes the "scriplet injection" Considering this is stated in ManifestV3's announcement and that no APIs have been made for it: > Beginning in Manifest V3, we will disallow extensions from using remotely-hosted code. This will require that all code executed by the extension be present in the extension’s package uploaded to the webstore. Server communication (potentially changing extension behavior) wil…

One interesting consequence of this is that Google's own javascript api client will no longer work with MV3 and there are apparently no plans to ever make it work.

See https://github.com/google/google-api-javascript-client/issue...

Chromium bug marked WONTFIX: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=116445...

Updated readme: https://github.com/google/google-api-javascript-client/blob/...

So effectively this means extensions on MV3 can't easily access Google apis, which is quite unfortunate since Chrome extensions in particular made Google authentication super straightforward (piggybacking off of chrome's built-in google authentication). If someone knows a better way I'd love to hear it.

I believe the reason that the current incarnation of the javascript library won't work is because it modifies the dom to add script tags to fetch and run the api library (or components of it), which is specifically what MV3 will disallow AFAIK.

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

#118
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was fully in the Google world prior to gorhill's posts on manifest v3 as a direct result the only thing I have left is a pixel phone, which will be going with the new iPhone (and in the meantime my entire family has been 'helpfully' migrated too) I may be up the extreme end of the distribution, but this sort of grassroots push is what dethroned IE, and the resultant loss of control of the web eliminated Microsoft's…

I think that what dethroned IE is that using your monopoly to maintain a moat of bugs only works for so long. If the browser is going to continue to be developed, eventually you're going to have to fix the bugs. By then, they were competing with Chrome, which was not bug-ridden and also backed by a juggernaut. The grassroots push that dethroned Microsoft's browser was Google's browser (aided by Firefox's suicide.)

The only thing that ever gets mass migration is substantial superiority in features they use.

Originally, it was tabbed browsing, which Opera and Mozilla had ~5 years before IE. Yes, Microsoft sucked that much in those days.

With Chrome, it was an embedded PDF viewer and V8 performance.

So essentially, mostly people don't switch browsers unless there's a very good reason to do so.

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

#119
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If uBlock doesn't provide a compatible extension or if their extension is worse than possible I'd likely just switch to the best alternative which will pop-up. I imagine most users will do the same.

Why are you willing to accept an inferior adblocker, instead of switching to another browser that maintains support for fully featured adblockers?

I've had multiple (typically but not always google) sites not work as well with firefox, as well as minor things like more captchas. I also don't want to worry and keep checking if my subpar performance on a site is because Google, a lazy dev or a lib didn't optimize for FF. Further, I just have a bunch of settings, extensions, saved password, history etc. already setup in Chrome.

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

#120
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If uBlock doesn't provide a compatible extension or if their extension is worse than possible I'd likely just switch to the best alternative which will pop-up. I imagine most users will do the same.

Why are you willing to accept an inferior adblocker, instead of switching to another browser that maintains support for fully featured adblockers?

A pragmatic reason for me: Firefox has been lagging a lot on my Windows machines for months, and I couldn’t figure out the problem. Tried extensive googling, even tried debugging it in the developer profiler to see if anything’s strange.

I’ve now given up, and switched to Chrome without regrets. I still miss Tree Style Tabs, but the sluggishness isn’t really worh it.

I’ll start using Firefox again until they fix this issue and realign their funding towards actual better engineering & performance instead spending on vanity “activist” projects.

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