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About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

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Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#111

Post by aryonoco »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #31
AndrewDavis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shame that Orion is Mac and iOS only. I found this statement[1] in response to a request for it on other platforms > We are getting a lot of repeat questions about windows/linux/android version and sometimes it appears that users think that the team is choosing not to work on these platforms. The situation is quite different and simpler - we do not have the resources to hire a new team to do any of these plat…

Also remember Apple users are much more lucrative, they tend to be way more willing to pay for software than Windows users.

But a lot of Apple users who use things such as Kagi and Orion (i.e., the hacker news crowd) also use other platforms. I have a MacBook but run Linux on my desktop and I know I’m not the only one. The ability to have the same browser on all platforms (with synced tabs, bookmarks etc) is really useful.

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#112

Post by mort96 »

bad_user wrote: post #90
mort96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some Chromium-based browsers like Brave have pledged that they'll keep v2 around for as long as it's practical? Though IMO, people who depend on Manifest v2 with Chromium forks are running on borrowed time, Chromium moves fast and I can't imagine that keeping the Manifest v2 code working will be very easy. Especially if Google takes advantage of the limited access extensions now have to the HTTP request flow…

Chromium browsers can't make that pledge and those that promised have red flags in my book. 1. These browsers can barely add their own functionality on top of upstream, and maintaining Manifest v2 compatibility may be expensive. Consider that the development of Chrome exceeds 1 billion per year. 2. They all use Chrome's Webstore as a distributing channel, except for Edge, but IMO, Microsoft has an even bigger interes…

I agree, and it seems like Brave agrees too. From https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/:

> For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix

I'm no fan of Brave, but it's nice to see that they at least somewhat acknowledge that they likely won't be able to support v2 forever. Only time will tell how long they're "able".

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#113

Post by homebrewer »

nickjj wrote: post #92
Liquix wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not just switch to a less hostile browser now instead of drawing it out for a few more months?

My machine is 10 years old. With Firefox video playback on YouTube is choppy even at 1080p. With Chrome it's perfectly smooth. If Firefox performed better for me I would have switched to it long ago. This is on Windows 10 btw.

Look into about:support, what does `HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING` and sibling features say? If it's off, you could try force-enabling video acceleration by setting `gfx.webrender.all` to `true` in about:config. I've had it force-enabled for years with no issues.

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#114

Post by arkx »

robin_reala wrote: post #34
stavros wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Cloudflare has no network effects. They offer good services that I can migrate off of if I need to. Google owns my life and it's really hard to go elsewhere, even if I want to.

It’s not that difficult to migrate from Google, there are plenty of good alternatives in every area. You just will probably not find everything integrated into one system, and you might have to pay for parts (but that’s OK, as you’re no longer the product). The trick is to start with the easy areas and gradually migrate bit by bit.

The essentials for me are private email, calendar & cloud storage. Here is my post-Google setup:

https://tuta.com/ is a German privacy-focused alternative that I'm currently using for email & calendar. Easy switch, although I was already using web clients rather than IMAP before the switch.

I looked at Proton Drive for cloud storage, but their CEO Andy Yen is a Trump supporter (https://archive.ph/2025.01.15-162500/https://www.reddit.com/...), which makes me question his decision-making.

I settled on a 5€ / month VPS from Hetzner and using Syncthing instead, but this requires some minimal amount of technical skills to set up and maintain.

There is no alternative to YouTube, unfortunately.

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#115

Post by mort96 »

lillecarl wrote: post #97
lifthrasiir wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dynamic web request hook is the only thing still relevant in MV2, right? Are there any other features to be backported from MV2?

I've tried to understand what makes this so incredible impossible to maintain by asking people, I feels like FUD from the FF community (which I'm a part of) because it's all just wishywashy statements that it'll be impossible to maintain.

The reason all the statements are "wishywashy" is because it's impossible to say anything concrete here, we don't know what Google is planning to change in the future. But we know that Chromium is a huge, fast-moving code base, and that dynamic web request hooks require support from core parts of Chromium. If Google refactors or rewrites those core parts in a way which makes them incompatible with per-request dynamic hooks, keeping around v2 support means carrying huge patch sets against core parts of Chromium, forever. That's likely going to be a very large ongoing maintenance burden.

But Google haven't made those changes to how web requests are performed yet, so it's impossible to say how difficult it will be to add back whatever functionality is necessary to add back dynamic web request hooks. Maybe it'll turn out to be relatively easy, and maybe Google will leave that part of Chromium relatively unchanged for a long time. Only time will tell.

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#116

Post by RamRodification »

muixoozie wrote: post #88
cpach wrote: post #18

I tried uBlock Origin Lite for a very short time. Then I realized that in Lite, the user can’t add custom rules[0]. That’s when I had enough. So now I’m using Firefox instead, where I can use uBlock Origin. [0] See https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1in2ls4/ubloc...

For anyone else like me that hasnt tried uBO lite wondering what features are missing: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

There seem to be quite a lot of other nice features which also do not work on Chromium-based browsers even with the v2 version of uBO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#Limitations_in_C...

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#117

Post by aryonoco »

Anyone looking for a new browser on the desktop, also give Floorp a look.

It’s a fork of Firefox by some young developers from Japan who seem to have good values and ideals. It’s been my daily driver for 6 months now (on Mac, Windows and Linux).

I originally found it because I wanted to easily have vertical tabs in Firefox (without the horizontal tab bar being left over) and got tired of manually editing Firefox’s chrome.css file (which acts differently on different platforms). Floorp allowed me to do this out of the box with no dramas.

I then discovered its many other cool features and Mozilla’s telemetry and their other sneaky advertising are also disabled by default. As a Firefox fork, it of course supports all Firefox extensions including proper uBlock origin.

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#118

Post by addandsubtract »

bad_user wrote: post #90
mort96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some Chromium-based browsers like Brave have pledged that they'll keep v2 around for as long as it's practical? Though IMO, people who depend on Manifest v2 with Chromium forks are running on borrowed time, Chromium moves fast and I can't imagine that keeping the Manifest v2 code working will be very easy. Especially if Google takes advantage of the limited access extensions now have to the HTTP request flow…

Chromium browsers can't make that pledge and those that promised have red flags in my book. 1. These browsers can barely add their own functionality on top of upstream, and maintaining Manifest v2 compatibility may be expensive. Consider that the development of Chrome exceeds 1 billion per year. 2. They all use Chrome's Webstore as a distributing channel, except for Edge, but IMO, Microsoft has an even bigger interes…

> Consider that the development of Chrome exceeds 1 billion per year.

1 billion what, LOC? Dollars? Downloads? Emails from the ad department demanding QoD improvements to Chrome?

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#119

Post by fsflover »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #106

It's sad that every thread about this topic turns into simplistic Firefox proselytism. My observation is that the developers who spearheaded the MV3 transition did so for understandable technical reasons and without any consideration for marketing concerns, yet their explanations get downvoted in favor of conspiracy theories. It's in fact the other browsers who try to market sticking to MV2 as a unique feature, even…

> My observation is that the developers who spearheaded the MV3 transition did so for understandable technical reasons and without any consideration for marketing concerns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Re: About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)

#120

Post by philistine »

whstl wrote: post #41
m4r1k wrote: post #36

About time to move back to Firefox. Manifest v3 is only accelerating DeGoogle.

Ad blocking is the one thing that pushed me over the edge to move to Firefox from Safari. I already knew the same change was coming to Chrome so I went directly to Firefox. I will burn my computer to the ground before I watch any kind of intrusive non-contextual advertisement online.

1Blocker on Safari is an excellent experience, and available for iPhone as well where it can remove ads from inside other apps. Letterboxd for example.
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