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Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

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Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#291

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

fastball wrote: post #213
mcv wrote: post #170

I'm in the process of switching as much as possible to Firefox. I now use Firefox Mobile on my smartphone, and my new laptop doesn't even get Chrome. And in many ways, it's been a breath of fresh air. Firefox gives my much more control over my privacy, and even recommends some extensions to improve it further. A couple of websites are sadly broken on my Firefox setup, but I can live without them. I want to get back t…

Why not something like Brave which has the performance of Chromium (still better than Firefox imo) because it's a fork but probably won't make similar business decisions to Google?

Isn't Google introducing this change upstream in Chromium? This means that it will affect downstream browsers, including Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, and a number of others[1]. The only way they will keep the old functionality is if they fork it and maintain it themselves going forward, which could potentially be made more difficult by further upstream changes made by Google. A few have vowed to do so[2], but Google has too much power controlling the upstream to guarantee they can continue it long-term.

Google has a stranglehold on the entire browser market through Chromium right now. Switching to non-Chromium-based browsers is a must.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browser... 2: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-...

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#292

Post by hombre_fatal »

saagarjha wrote: post #145
pilif wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari has a much larger limit for blocking list entries though.

It’s not all that much larger; the limit is a combination of a hard cap of 50,000 rules and what Jetsam will let you get away with.

You can bundle many rule lists inside one extension. It's how 1Blocker works, and I did it myself for my own adblocking extension.

I'm not sure if this is possible in Chrome's proposal though.

Maybe this change will finally get people to prune Easylist which had 30% outdated cosmetic-filter cruft when I last sampled it along with hobby horse websites <0.00001% people would ever visit. Right now it's basically like an append-only legacy CSS file.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#293

Post by jddj »

wffurr wrote: post #224

Half of all detected malicious extensions used the web request API to spy on users. The rule limit has already been raised to 150,000. Plenty of ad blockers will still work in Chrome. This thread is chock full of motivated reasoning and deliberate misinformation.

Can you spell out what you are implying here?

Is it that the people posting in this thread are.. authors or stakeholders of malicious extensions? Do they all work for Mozilla? Are they a part of some rival industry which stands to benefit from the fall of adtech? Have they shorted GOOG?

Surely it would be strange to class arguments from users who want to continue to block ads in their browsers the same, effective way that they have been for years as motivated reasoning. What sinister motivation am I missing?

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#294

Post by iwalton3 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #203
koolba wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLS makes that tricky as you need a MITM proxy.

And cert pinning in the browsers blows this out of the water, which is why I'm of two minds about it as a security feature. It seems that a lot of security these days is really about removing people's control over their own devices.

Certificate Key Pinning is in the process of being removed from browsers. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/04/chrome-67-...

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#295

Post by kiwicopple »

vbezhenar wrote: post #196
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #112

The biggest advertising company in history tries to kill blocking advertisements in their browser? How am I not surprised. I bet this move is also to kill the workings of extensions like DecentralEyes and others that try to protect users from being tracked. The whole changing of the API into a "sure we'll block that URL for ya, sometimes maybe" model reeks of increasing user tracking. They'll work out the kinks to le…

They are not trying to kill advertisements. They want to replace API to provide better performance. That's about it. ad blocking extensions won't disappear. May be some will, and new extensions emerge.

If performance was the criteria by which they made decisions then they would probably bake ad-blocking directly into chrome, since ads/tracking is one of the leading reasons for poor performance

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#297

Post by bildung »

vbezhenar wrote: post #196
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #112

The biggest advertising company in history tries to kill blocking advertisements in their browser? How am I not surprised. I bet this move is also to kill the workings of extensions like DecentralEyes and others that try to protect users from being tracked. The whole changing of the API into a "sure we'll block that URL for ya, sometimes maybe" model reeks of increasing user tracking. They'll work out the kinks to le…

They are not trying to kill advertisements. They want to replace API to provide better performance. That's about it. ad blocking extensions won't disappear. May be some will, and new extensions emerge.

By that reasoning Microsoft didn't prevent others from writing .doc-compatible word processors either - they just defined the format as basically a memory dump of Word :)

This is how a company implements measures that could be a legal problem: By formally making a technical decision and having the actual goal as a by-product of that decision.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#298

Post by breakingcups »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #200
NieDzejkob wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not their target. It's the less technical people they have in mind here.

Fortunately, a lot of less technical people have technical people in their immediate families and circles of friends.

The big question is, how many of those less technical people switched to Chrome because of technical friends or family and how many switched because of Google abusing its monopoly by displaying deceptive ads for their browser on all web real estate they own?

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#299

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

alpaca128 wrote: post #152
square_usual wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Brave as your Chromium-based browser. It blocks ads natively, and I've not yet run into a site that required Chrome that didn't work on Brave.

Suggesting a browser because it has adblock preinstalled is like recommending a specific Linux distribution because it comes with LibreOffice out of the box: it doesn't matter for anyone who can click 2-3 buttons. What matters to me is the part I can't influence that easily, and I simply prefer Firefox because it's not based on Chrome. Not something many browser developers can say nowadays.

But if you need Chrome for certain sites that only support Chrome, then giving Chrome the middle finger by using a non-Chrome Chrome seems like the best of two evils. I realize that sites only supporting Chrome is terrible and shouldn't be a thing, but sometimes it really can't be avoided.

I say this as someone who uses 99% Firefox, 1% Chrome... I had never thought about this point I'm making before.

Re: Google Begins Testing Extension Manifest V3 in Chrome Canary

#300

Post by pmlnr »

rusk wrote: post #210
pmlnr wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> over the last 12 months More like since 2014. I use google search for one thing only these days: product search, when I'm trying to find a local dealer for a product. For everything else, duckduckgo, which, to be completely honest, is a lot more like the old google from the early 2000s, than the current google.

> More like since 2014 I do remember remarking to somebody around this time that google search had become something of a glorified grep. You could still get things though. What I meant in this comment is that it has gotten even worse to the point that its almost unusable. It really does remind me of Microsoft of the 00’s.

I think 2014 was the big change into "AI first" for Google. I remember Translate working fine in 2014 in China with the offline pack, and the offline pack was ~220MB. In 2016, the offline pack was ~30MB and nobody understood the translations over there.
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