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

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

#121

Post by robin_reala » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

arkx wrote: post #114

robin_reala wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/h…

Right, yes, YouTube is the big outlier. After I’d deleted my old Google account I created a new YouTube-specific account, and run it in a Firefox container to keep me logged out everywhere else.

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

#122

Post by bad_user » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

addandsubtract wrote: post #118

bad_user wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Dollars, current estimates ranging between 1 and 2 billion.

Firefox is currently developed with half a billion, but IMO, that is why there are only 3 browser engines left, with all the “forks” depending on the upstream.

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

#123

Post by bambax » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

forvelin wrote: post #17

regardless of what people complain of, firefox is still an awesome daily driver. nobody likes the direction the MF is taking the browser to but at least we can influence it, unlike google.

It also works flawlessly on Android, with uBlock Origin blocking everything, including ads on youtube (provided one stays in the browser of course, and not use the app).

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

#124

Post by jocoda » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:33 PM UTC

xattt wrote: post #40

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...

It’s only a matter of time before the modern Phoebus cartel starts blocking Firefox.

I can live with that. By blocking Firefox they would self identify as user hostile in the same way that google has done with V3. I think this would a huge step forward, a massive shit filter.

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

#125

Post by aryonoco » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:36 PM UTC

trallnag wrote: post #26

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #3

Firefox is fine as daily browser and the few websites that don‘t work in it start working if you enable the chrome mask plugin for them.

If only Firefox would properly support PWAs. I know that there are workarounds like installing the PWAs in Chrome and setting up an extension that redirects links clicked in a PWA to be opened in Firefox, but it is a hassle.

It’s funny/tragic how Firefox used to be so far ahead in these areas which it has now fallen so far behind. Before PWAs or installing web apps was a thing, Firefox allowed you to basically achieve the same using “chromeless” tabs. Then they gave up on that and disabled it

Before anyone had ever heard of Electron, you used to be able to embed gecko into other apps and it could render html in other applications (that’s how Firefox itself started cause the old monolithic Mozilla suite separated the engine into gecko so other apps could use it, and then a bunch of Mozilla engineers started developing a new UI around it as their side project). Of course they gave up on that, and look where we are now.

Testament to its engineering team really that despite so many own goals and false directions from its leadership (Remember Firefox OS?) the project is still alive.

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

#126

Post by aryonoco » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:40 PM UTC

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…

It doesn’t require believing in conspiracy theories to see a clear conflict of interest.

Ad blocking was one of the original reasons people switched from IE to Firefox in the 2004-2008 era. Hopefully, history will repeat itself again.

In the long run, the answer will not be Chrome. The world needs a browser engine that’s not tied to an ad company

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

#127

Post by bad_user » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:45 PM UTC

skinkestek wrote: post #49

forvelin wrote: post #17

regardless of what people complain of, firefox is still an awesome daily driver. nobody likes the direction the MF is taking the browser to but at least we can influence it, unlike google.

Best thing we can do to influence it is probably to use and fund forks such as LibreWolf, hoping that they are in a position to continue development once Google decides to tell the manager of Mozilla to finally destroy it completely. (Yes, that is a joke I hope, but if I compare what I think a puppet controlled by Google would do to destroy the Mozilla brand to what Mozillas CEO has been doing, I think there is a lot…

Thinking that funding forks, like LibreWolf, would save said forks from dying if Mozilla goes under, is naive.

The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year. Estimates for Chrome range from 1 to 2 billion $ per year. In other words, take the donations of something like Wikimedia, which is arguably very successful in asking for donations, and you'd still be very short on the money needed to fund a web browser. And if you bring those costs down to something more manageable, like say, 100 million $, and assuming you can convince people to donate (IMO, when pigs will fly), then you'll have a browser that may be completely unable to compete with Chromium.

All the browser “forks” survive because Google and Mozilla are doing the hard work.

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

#128

Post by lnl » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:53 PM UTC

TiredOfLife wrote: post #95

yuvalr1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply cannot give up the option of zapping distractions off of my screen. I really cannot understand how people can use Youtube or even a Youtube embedded video without zapping away the distractions. There is no way I'm coming back to Chrome if they don't support manifest V2. It's Firefox for me.

I use uBlock origin lite and there are no ads on youtube or embedded youtube videos

The parent comment is talking about distractions, not ads. YouTube has plenty of those, even embedded YouTube videos, unless you pause the video before it ends. uBlock Origin Lite cannot block elements except through packaged rulesets, and while there are some ad-blocker lists that are meant to block annoyances on pages in addition to ads, everybody has a different idea on what is an annoyance on a webpage.

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

#129

Post by frizlab » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #22

deanc wrote: post #2

I see people reporting that the extension has already been forcefully removed (or disabled in some cases) from their Chrome. This hasn't happened to me (v133 on MacOS). I have primarily been using Chrome up until this point as I was under the impression that performance (and therefore battery life) is bad with FF on MacOS. Recent results seem to indicate that Chrome is in fact the worst offender [1]. Yesterday I unin…

I'm happy with 1Blocker in Safari

1Blocker is really good

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

#130

Post by bad_user » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:59 PM UTC

philistine wrote: post #120

whstl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Safari's ad-blocking abilities are no more potent than what Chrome's Manifest v3 gives you. In fact, the changes in MV3 were inspired by Safari.

I used to work adjacent to a team working on anti-ad-blocking tech. Safari's protections are fairly easy to circumvent, with Adblock Plus not being great either. It was uBlock Origin that was making this team sweat, and they didn't even bother with it.

The reason is that whatever you can do in the browser, e.g., via JavaScript, uBO can inject scripts with stubs and protections to fool any anti-ad-blocking tech that ads are, in fact, being served. There's no way to combat uBO without a degraded user experience, even for users that aren't using ad-blockers. Compared with uBlock Origin, other alternatives looked like toys.

Note that many people are happy with just DNS-level blocking, even if it's the easiest to circumvent. That's because many publishers don't bother with circumventing ad-blocking protections, either because it's too expensive, or because they don't want to piss off users. But that doesn't mean that the available solutions are equivalent. They aren't.

---

Note, if an ad-blocker also works “inside other apps”, on iPhone it's only because the same blockers can be activated inside web views. But not in all apps and not even in all web views, e.g., try it in Facebook's app.

Android has a solution that actually works in apps, but to achieve this, it requires root, and it will act as a man in the middle, and that's not something that I can trust:

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html