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Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

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Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#471

Post by thaumaturgy »

ashleyn wrote: post #61
insanitybit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's comp…

I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.

Indeed. Around that era I had a fun little "crashmybrowser.com" toy site that had a few different JS tricks you could click that would absolutely wedge your browser (any browser, at the time). This had come after years of my being vocally annoyed that there weren't better guardrails around Javascript. Each of the functions was based on a real-world failure case.

Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions.

Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems.

I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#475

Post by zamadatix »

taviso wrote: post #433
zamadatix wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any MV3 issue could probably be summed up as "MV3 isn't so bad, just the implementation in Chrome" where Chrome defines MV3 (as it's not a W3C standard) and ships it as such. That said, > Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization It's not "browser initialization" that was blocked, it was blocking network requests for pages until they were processed by all components in the chain. No…

> and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker. Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately. > With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders Of course an exte…

> Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.

There were several workarounds like suspendTabsUntilReady which helped greatly in this half of the problem. Then it would solidly stay permanently registered too. I'm pretty sure none of these work in Chrome anymore though, it was obvious they never intended these sorts of things to work that way.

Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just guarantee full filtering on startup as seen in this change https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1447551

> Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.

What you said is so, it just might highlight more than what you'd like it to at the same time. That it was missing before had nothing to do with the difficulty or need for MV3. uMatrix had it for a while and Gorhill regretted it because it didn't change things like the user agent JS would report and such, hence he wouldn't port it over. The above filter has the same problems. Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher, that it's normal quality is why it was never in the old extension though.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#476

Post by luckilydiscrete »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #25

I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone. But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.

> I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.

I've met so many people in the tech industry who use Zen Browser. Not even because of some ideological point, but just because it is cooler.

So no, I don't believe it'll be gone. I believe firefox and ff-based browsers will actually make a comeback.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#477

Post by LordDragonfang »

beloch wrote: post #174

Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad s…

It feels weird that everyone is talking like Google has banned adblocking in Chrome, when there's dozens of adblockers still in the extension store, including an updated version of uBO that works 90% the same.

Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1]

The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is.

[1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#478

Post by hirvi74 »

jolmg wrote: post #311
hirvi74 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a better platform when it was its own company back in the day.

Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.

I would enjoy automatically generated subtitles more if they weren't wrong about 10% of the time.

I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"

It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.

I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#479

Post by doublepg23 »

inglor wrote: post #229
sunaookami wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.

Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users. This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.

TBF KaiOS had a measure of success but it is now on life support.

The fact is Android could be scaled down way better than KaiOS could be scaled up.

(and you could just wait for the perf/$ to continue to decrease).

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

#480

Post by taviso »

zamadatix wrote: post #475
taviso wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker. Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately. > With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders Of course an exte…

> Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately. There were several workarounds like suspendTabsUntilReady which helped greatly in this half of the problem. Then it would solidly stay permanently registered too. I'm pretty sure none o…

> Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just support full filtering on startup

Sure, but as I said, it's a design decision, and nothing to do with MV3. I'm not trying to litigate it one way or the other.

I do think DNR is a good solution, and that request callbacks were a bad idea. That's my opinion - and the counterargument is obvious -- you can't do literally everything you could do in a callback declaratively. That doesn't sway me, I still think it's better!

> Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher

It was just a trivial example of using a powerful new feature that uBO doesn't have, not a full featured extension! The fact that it's possible at all is the point, it's cool.

You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.

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