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AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

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Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#161

Post by ameshkov »

lapcat wrote: post #77

Manifest v3 is going to be a slaughter. Extension developers have known the slaughter was coming, but Chrome users are going to be taken by surprise. Many free Chrome extensions aren't going to get updated at all for v3, because it's too much work. Many aren't going to work right anymore because of the new restrictions. And ad blocking aside, v3 seems like a nightmare in general, and still quite buggy. The service wo…

> The service workers vs. background script issue discussed by AdGuard will affect many or most extensions.

This is so true. It is often overlooked, but the root problem of Manifest V3 is not declarativeNetRequest, but this service worker move.

Firefox and Safari implemented an alternative to them so there's a chance.

Google proposed a different solution (called "Offscreen documents") which is also not too bad, but I doubt they'll implement it by the January deadline.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#162

Post by CameronNemo »

titaniczero wrote: post #132

Does anyone know what is Edge's take on MV3? Will they just leave it untouched and obey or do they have alternative paths planned for adblockling like Brave (In addition to the native blocker, Brendan Eich also said that they will "put back the lost functionality for uBO, uMatrix and other legit extensions" [1]). I have a feeling that Edge will become mainstream in the near future because it is the default browser on…

Funny how the only browsers that matter are the ones shipped by default by OS vendors... almost like the whole Windows/IE antitrust action was for show. Or I guess the OS vendors realized being an oligopoly is a good workaround for dated antitrust policy.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#163

Post by ameshkov »

titaniczero wrote: post #132

Does anyone know what is Edge's take on MV3? Will they just leave it untouched and obey or do they have alternative paths planned for adblockling like Brave (In addition to the native blocker, Brendan Eich also said that they will "put back the lost functionality for uBO, uMatrix and other legit extensions" [1]). I have a feeling that Edge will become mainstream in the near future because it is the default browser on…

As I understand, Edge will also migrate to MV3 completely.

Also, I am not entirely sure other Chromium-based browsers will be able to maintain MV2 compatibility in the long run.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#164

Post by Fnoord »

cycomanic wrote: post #131
chrismorgan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say fairness also requires mentioning how the browser has been able to improve because of killing off XUL extensions; technologically, they were holding things back. Firefox is considerably faster than would have been possible without breaking a great many XUL extensions anyway. And more secure, if you care about that kind of thing, which normal people probably do or should, but frankly it’s the performance I car…

Regarding pentadactyl, I'm using tridactyl on Firefox and essentially for all my use cases it behaves the same as pentadactyl. I realise that some of the advanced functionality of pentadactyl is not available (IIRC pentadactyl allowed you to essentially reprogram the browser), but I have to say I'm not really missing much.

There's also Vimium for Firefox called vimium-ff. I don't know which one's better, I just use vimium-ff.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#165

Post by Terretta »

webmobdev wrote: post #34

I don't know if it is cartelisation (both Apple and Google have an ad division and it is in their interest to work together on some aspects of this business) or Google bribed Apple (through its ios search engine deal), but Safari webkit also has limitations in ad blocking through the content blocking API which Apple created for Safari. (See Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari #15…

Saying they both “have an ad division” is a remarkably unbalanced comparison.

Google ads revenue 2021: 209 billion out of 256 billion, 80%

Apple ads revenue 2021: $3.7 billion of 365 billion, 1%

We further need to understand the difference between operating an ad exchange:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...

And allowing first party and purchased ads for products within a marketplace the user is already visiting:

https://searchads.apple.com/help/get-started/0001-compare-ap...

They can only be validly compared once this is true of both ad services:

> [Ad service] doesn’t buy or share users’ personal information with other companies. We don’t track people by linking user or device data collected from [first party] apps with user or device data collected from third parties for advertising targeting or measurement. And we don’t share user or device data with data brokers.

https://searchads.apple.com/privacy

Not saying they’re “all good”, just “least worst”.

Scroll down in the second link to see what Apple do gather and use for targeting. Unhappily, the user consent more about personalization than about aggregation in the first place. Note also the missing word “sell” in “doesn’t buy or share”, perhaps they think sell is implied by share, but also perhaps not.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#166

Post by pdappollonio »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #117
groovybits wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you think is the future (+2 years) for people with hatred for ads? DNS-based blocking

> DNS-based blocking Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636412

DNS based ad blocking is slightly different than VPN based blocking. VPN is there for people running environments where DoH is not yet supported.

Newer versions of iOS, Android and Windows support it already.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#167

Post by ameshkov »

markstos wrote: post #147

I’m curious how the performance of the new AdGuard extension has changed.

It's worse than it was and the reason for that is not the declarativeNetRequest, but replacing background page with a service worker.

You see, now extensions are supposed to do background work in an ephemeral service worker. This service worker lifetime is very short (up to 5 minutes, then it's getting killed forcibly). So it's constantly getting killed and waked back up. Waking up includes doing some initialization which consumes additional cpu cycles.

The situation will improve when Google implements the alternative to service worker (so-called "Offscreen documents"), but no one knows when exactly this will happen.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#168

Post by ameshkov »

TrickyRick wrote: post #124
webmobdev wrote: post #34

I don't know if it is cartelisation (both Apple and Google have an ad division and it is in their interest to work together on some aspects of this business) or Google bribed Apple (through its ios search engine deal), but Safari webkit also has limitations in ad blocking through the content blocking API which Apple created for Safari. (See Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other blockers) for Safari #15…

Ad Guard works great in Safari, I have yet to see ads it doesn't block

We did our best with Safari, but believe me, it actually works worse than AdGuard in Chrome and Firefox. Safari with all its limitations is no better than Chrome with MV3.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#169

Post by Ygg2 »

pessimizer wrote: post #116
Ygg2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the extinguish phase, of EEE.

Firefox did them a favor by trashing the extension ecosystem that had put the pressure on Google in the first place.

Firefox did it because of security/performance concerns. Being able to customize UI doesn't lend itself to easy refactoring.

In order to compete with Chrome most of XUL extensions had to go.

Hyrum's law in practice.

Re: AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

#170

Post by cycomanic »

moonchrome wrote: post #137
avhception wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to say that you (content blocker devs) have been heard, maybe not by the majority of browser users but at least people like me are championing Firefox over webkit-based browsers precisely because to do otherwise would be to loose control of the web to FAANG, especially Google. I've been telling everyone who would listen about how Google leverages Chrom(e/ium) against user interests and have deployed Fir…

I wonder why not create a ad-free/privacy fork of Chromium. Especially on Mobile, I'd use that for sure. Existing ones have huge strings attached. Mozilla is basically FUBAR at this point.

Why is Mozilla fubar? I'd argue it's much less work to get behind Mozilla than trying to maintain a chromium fork.
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