271–280 of 490 posts
I've finally switched (back) to firefox today. I switched from firefox to chrome for their superior devtools a few years back, but hopefully firefox has had time to catch up. Everything old is new again!
their dev environment is still pretty bad
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Are you certain? The last I heard about it from Vivaldi[0], they were only going to keep the MV2 code around so long as it's in the upstream codebase: > We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code. Note that June 2025…
But... what could possibly be the point of using a chromium based browser that is not Chrome, if not for MV2 support?
Also for those who use cloud bookmark/history/tab sync, people might just not want Google specifically to have that data; Vivaldi does its own sync.
I am tied to Microsoft Edge for sync between desktop and phone, and Microsoft Edge on iOS has AdBlock built in. But looking at this it seems inevitable that Edge will retain V2. As to switching to Firefox? I'd love to, but Firefox on iOS refuses to put in an AdBlocker. Yea, you can use Firefox Focus but that one doesn't sync. I don't understand Mozilla's stance on this.
Notably, Firefox is not removing v2 support (at least for now as of March 2024) > Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed. [1] [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/a…
To my knowledge the “big” chrome engine alternatives aren’t either. I know that Vivaldi and Brave plan on keeping around v2 as long as it is economically feasible
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-...
Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome. Despite all their made-up "security" reasons, everyone knows this is solely about making adblock less effective. For many users, adblock is what makes chrome bearable - and if they make it unbearable, then those users will leave. Slowly but surely. Google seems much too sure of itself making this change. I hope their arrogance pays off just the same as Microsoft's di…
Am I missing any? https://gs.statcounter.com https://analytics.usa.gov https://www.w3counter.com
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Agreed on hoping this is the inflection point, but only partial agreement that it's about adblock. For sure Google wants adblock to die, but I think it goes even deeper than that. I think it's part of a much bigger trend in tech in general but also in Google: Removing user control. When you look at the "security" things they are doing, many of them have a common philosophy underpinning them that the user (aka device…
> To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in. That was a world where the user base was much more limited and devices were less capable. Now we have children, grandparents, educated, and uneducated users with access to web connected devices. These devices now contain everything about you. Compromise of a device can destro…
Write insecure software and you'll get screwed by hackers. Write secure locked down software nobody can touch or modify, and you'll get doubly screwed by a large corporation that wants to pound every penny they can out of your bloody corpse, upto the point your device is compromised by the corporation who can do whatever they want, but you cannot tell.
There is no win situation here, there are only trade offs.
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This is just because Google was especially insidious about how they crippled ad blockers in v3. Adblockers do multiple things: 1. Visibly block ads from the user 2. Block the user tracking that's attached to those ads 3. Protect the user from malware 4. Save bandwidth and cpu cycles by not loading all that junk 5. Allow control to users over how a webpage is displayed to them Arguably uBlock Origin Lite can only acco…
I don't think any of that is accurate though. Manifest v3 blocks user tracking -- if the request is blocked, any tracking attached to it is blocked. I'm sure it's not 100% perfect, but it's certainly working well enough in practice. And what malware are you talking about? If a request is blocked, it's blocked. It doesn't matter if it's an ad or malware. Manifest v3 is better at #4, because the junk isn't loaded, and…
These limits are easy targets for ad networks to overwhelm or outmaneuver.
That's what everyone was saying
No one was saying that adblockers would literally stop working, so it's beyond disingenuous to dismiss people's issues with these changes by just saying 'works for me'.
What evidence would you actually accept anyway? Do you need a leaked internal document from Google saying literally 'devs, go neuter adblockers' before you believe Google might have bad intentions surrounding people's ability to block ads and tracking?
If security and performance were the actual driving forces of DeclarativeNetRequest, then they would have simply added it in addition to the existing webRequest block functionality. uBlock Origin and most extensions would have happily moved the majority of their rules to the static list if it meant better performance and privacy while keeping around the webRequest blocks for the things that actually need it.
Google has gone from having only one nuclear-level option for influencing adblockers (aka delisting) to now having its boot softly pressed against their necks and plenty of levers to pull. And you want me to look at that and go, 'There's no direct evidence of malicious intention there... so perfectly normal and/or acceptable behavior by the world's biggest ad company'?
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It's worth noting that the maintenance of the "lite" version is at some nonzero risk of burnout for its developers, ironically in part due to Mozilla being unnecessarily hostile: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/197#issueco... discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707418 - and while there's no plan yet to discontinue the Chrome MV3 compatible version, there are a million ways that this c…
> It's worth noting that the maintenance of the "lite" version is at some nonzero risk of burnout for its developers, ironically in part due to Mozilla being unnecessarily hostile: Why would you even use the lite version on firefox when the original works?
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This is just because Google was especially insidious about how they crippled ad blockers in v3. Adblockers do multiple things: 1. Visibly block ads from the user 2. Block the user tracking that's attached to those ads 3. Protect the user from malware 4. Save bandwidth and cpu cycles by not loading all that junk 5. Allow control to users over how a webpage is displayed to them Arguably uBlock Origin Lite can only acco…
uBlock lite can accomplish 2, 3, 4 completely. It's only #1 and #5 that are truly affected by v3. But those two were already pretty limited in chrominum browsers compared to firefox.
And if we are being honest about those limits, they have already been exceeded. Ublock origin is going from 100,000 to 500,000 dynamic rules to just 30k rules(only 5k of those can be dynamic) in the lite version.
Adblockers have absolutely been neutered in v3.
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This is why we need to break up Google. Google is a de facto monopoly. They own the entire web. The gateway, the browser, the protocols, advertising, discovery. Google is too big.
Sure, but we saw this coming a mile away (as in, people have been saying this about Chrome for about a decade). People--especially tech nerds--didn't have to switch to the closed source, conflict-of-interest, browser. But, everyone did, and this is what we get for it. We now have proprietary DRM built in to the web standards, and all kinds of other bullshit, because a bunch of people decided to not learn any lessons…
Do you not remember all the ads promoting chrome? First was chrome-frame IE extension, then came all the ads - then tie-ins where you got Chrome in addition when you really wanted some other app.
They pushed it hard because they knew they had no real competitors and could eat up marketshare.