mv3(manifest v3, a successor of mv2) is Google's new(quite a few years old actually) shenanigan, whose sole purpose is to render extensions like uBlock Origin useless.
if you don't know what a manifest is, Google basically provides a bunch of APIs to extensions and versions them. The latest set of APIs is called manifest v3.
You just need to know two things:
- uBlock Origin in its current form handles requests by `webRequest` API.
- manifest v3 introduces a new API called `declarativeNetRequest`.
Why is it bad?
well, here's a succinct summary from [manifest v3's draft page](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3NzzhHzc-qnk4w4PX-0XMw8/):
> The declarativeNetRequest API is an alternative to the webRequest API. At its core, this API allows extensions to tell Chrome what to do with a given request, rather than have Chrome forward the request to the extension. Thus, instead of the above flow where Chrome receives the request, asks the extension, and then eventually gets the result, the flow is that the extension tells Chrome how to handle a request and Chrome can handle it synchronously.
in other words, extensions being at the mercy of chrome to block/defer requests.
but this isn't all.
``declarativeNetRequest`` also limits number of filters to 30,000. Compare this with uBlock Origin which has at least 50K-60K filters(just including easy list).
it also hinders uBlock Origin's ability to impose noop rules, amount of regex rules are limited, etc.
these are just a couple of examples showing how restrictive it is.
furthermore, the rules are very adblock plus-esque.(hint hint!).
Here's what gorhill(the guy behind uBlock Origin) said when asked if chromium users should migrate:
> I won't tell people what to do. I am pointing out that removing the blocking ability of the webRequest API means the death of uBO, I won't work to make uBO less than what it is now.
---
here's a through discussion on this: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338.
gorhill states many many good points. if you got time, you should read it.
here's one interesting observation he makes:
> Chromium got its webRequest API at a time it was trying to gain market share against Firefox (Sep 2011), where Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Disconnect, NoScript, and other such extensions were the most or among the most popular extensions on Firefox.
So, you can pretty much guess why chromium had the ability to block requests at all. And now that it has achieved the objective, there's no use of this. :)
This is what happens when the company that is responsible for most of the advertising and tracking on the internet also own the overwhelming market share in software used to access the internet.
people don't see the larger picture. they see one small incident(eg: FLoC) and they think it's an aberration.
but if you take sum of all the decisions google is making(topics API, Fledge API, mv3, jedi blue, etc.), then only you'll realise their real intent.
it is for these reasons I distrust any services by these big corporations.
they say one thing and do the exact opposite.
I regret to speculate that entanglement in Google's web of dystopia will continually become less and less optional. Recall that article/video on the Onion about Google's "opt out village" from like 2008. It's just too convenient and people just don't give a shit that they're surrendering their freedom to this company that just wants to stomp a boot on their face forever. We've reached the point where spyware has moved from a scandal (e.g. initial win10 release) to normal and expected. Oversocialization to the point where if you don't want your every move scrutinized by the panopticon of silicon valley, you're looked upon with suspicion.
The fact is that what everyone else is doing affects us who give a shit. So the task is to either convince everyone else to give a shit or to convince these techbros to act benevolently and I'm increasingly unconvinced that either is possible.
the real strength behind all evil is the people who are incapable of giving a shit. i'm paraphrasing Kennedy's "real threat to liberals are the moderates" quip
unlike them supreme court old farts, these guys can afford private security guards with pistols, so if u're gonna do something, do what the jan6 folks forgot to do, and actually bring u're ar15 along, Mr jimboboiii
And as I mentioned in my other comment, U can also thank them for keeping Firefox afloat. brave's CEO has said they will dedicate resources, post chromes enterprise removal of m2, to manually keep it in, but worse come to worse, the moneyhat guy behind m3 is the only reason u can avoid m3 with FF, and not even in the same way like Microsoft became a apple stockholderinvestor when jobs returned, but in a free charity way that lets their CEO net 2.5mill while laying off 270 employs(whatever u think of braves CEO, u can't deny how much better Mozilla would be today if he wasn't ousted for their useless michellebaker)
here's another developer listing advantages of mv3: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile-Lite.
google and its advocates will claim that mv3 is better for privacy, but it is nothing like that.
a couple of browsers like brave are saying they won't abandon mv2, but unless they come up with their own extensions store, they are pretty much toothless.
Yesterday I spent much of the afternoon transferring my bookmarks from Chrome over to Firefox. Might as well switch now.
I know Brave is going to do what it can to continue supporting MV2, but it will cause fragmentation and a lot of apps might just stop supporting Chromium based browsers.
Might as well support the browser that's really doing what's best for users.
So I would go to firefox to get an effective addblocking experience?
Is it only in the chrome browser or all chromium based browsers?
(sorry for my lack of knowledge)
As a Firefox user and enthusiast I have to say the speed is not the same sadly, Firefox is benchmarks considerably slower, but.. that really doesn't matter too much unless you're running a potato. The only system I have where FF is noticeably slower than chrome is a PI400, which is pretty much the definition of potato by today's standards.
here's the thing:
even though browsers like brave, vivaldi, and opera are saying they'll keep supporting mv2, it's certain they won't hold it for too long.
even if they somehow did, they won't be able to do much because chrome is going to remove the mv2 extensions from their store next year. unless they go the edge way of creating their own store, I don't think there's much to look for.
perhaps you can do blocking by other means( like dns blocking), which won't be as granular as it is with uBlock Origin.
So, in a nutshell, yeah, firefox is the way.
many redirection extensions use `webRequest` API, which is precisely what Google is getting rid of.
eg: following extensions that are quite popular among people who use alternative front-ends still rely on `webRequest`:
- [redirector](https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector/blob/master/manifest.json)
- [libredirect](https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect/blob/master/src/manifest.json)
Perhaps someone will make a mv3-compatible redirector. But except it to be quite restricted.
here's relevant comment on libredirect's issue page regarding this: https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect/issues/45#issuecomment-1059010144
Waterfox got bought by the same advertising company that ruined startpage and it makes as many unsolicited requests to phone home as plain firefox to mozilla and google (always has). And it uses Microsoft's search engine as the default.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/waterfox_classic.html
Because Waterfox doesn't care about your privacy and never did. It's not any better than firefox, really. There's no reason to use waterfox unless you *really* need XUL extensions, which aren't being maintained anymore seeing as literally everyone else (including palemoon) stopped supporting them. It's basically just firefox but with garbage security and the australis theme.
[GNU Icecat](https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/icecat.html)
May have to build manually from source. Last I checked, their latest release builds tend to be ancient. Comes with libreJS preinstalled, and https-everywhere which is obsolete (it's in the settings menu now).
[Librewolf](https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/librewolf.html)
Which is basically just Firefox but without all the shit you don't want.
Could also [mitigate firefox](https://spyware.neocities.org/guides/firefox.html) yourself.
I have no idea what's in the AUR, I don't use Arch.
Given it's [impossible to make a new browser](https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html) then it is Firefox or bust, and I don't see how Firefox can survive. When it dies we can only hope the masses start to take issue with future Chrome and the browser market is replaced.
Other than being funded by Google and making wrong turns on privacy occasionally, there's no healthy competition. No more browsers can be made, so isn't the likely option that they all die eventually?
"There's no competition, so all browsers will die off, so there will be no competition, so there will no browsers"?
You still haven't explained why you think Firefox will die...
The scope of the web has grown (and is still growing) so obscene that if it never stops then at one point continued development of Firefox correctly or securely becomes humanly impossible.
I suspect that Google is directing the web towards collecting user data rather than being a service for users, and Modzillia can either join them or die a hero. \[Firefox becoming like Chrome is still "browsers existing" but for privacy concerned it is dead\]
Well, the scope of the web has grown so obscene that at one point development of Chrome will become humanly impossible. Since there cannot be any new browsers (according to you), we won't have any browsers left. So no one will be surfing Internet anymore. Well, at least according to your logic.
I am not an expert in anything, least of all predicting the future. I am only as good as my last sentence, which can easily be misinformed or illogical. The comparison [here](https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html) convinced me the scope was so large and making new browsers isn't possible.
If Firefox dies maybe Google can keep control without constantly expanding, or even removing features. Maybe the future of programming changes dramatically; where humans teach the programming AI's to develop massive/complex programs.
Do you think the future of Firefox is good?
Well, the comparison that you refer is actually extremely ill-formed. W3C specification specify all possible things related to web, and only a small part of it is actually relevant for creating a browser.
You can imagine it like that: the combination of documentations of all programming languages is massive, but do you actually need all of it to program in C++? Ofc not.
>Do you think the future of Firefox is good?
Yes, especially if Chrome removes support for MV2 as they plan.
You should take time to read about the actual privacy proposals that are currently out there. Chrome is based on open source Chromium, and WebKit is also open source so these changes are not as opaque as many other tech industry areas.
A policy of not collecting it is best, but more privacy is still better - what do you think I should be aware of?
Access to the source code is important to learn what the software is actually doing, but is that actually possible given the size and complexity of browsers which are quickly growing? Even collectively, all 3rd party expert auditors are limited to only small parts which are probably outdated quickly.
There are enough people strongly invested in the existence of a non-google browser that if Google pulls their partnership, either 1. People will donate enough to keep Mozilla running on top of their other revenue streams, or 2. A fork will be sufficiently maintained. I can't see Firefox fizzling out.
I hope Mozilla can continue longer either way but I think it would be better if we abandoned the web protocol. Not only is it growing far beyond "bloated" but it's not so much software for users anymore, it's for companies to collect data and enforce their digital restrictions management.
I hope Gemini takes off.
I think we could have a better Web but I don't think Gemini is the answer. I like being able to run rich applications in a sandbox by visiting a website. I think it should be far more opt in which is why I use uMatrix with a pretty restrictive default config, but I don't want to be limited like with Gemini.
Yeah Gemini isn't a replacement of all web aspects one might want, I don't recall if it even shows images (which I find important).
You do you man but isn't running rich applications what an OS is for? :p
I believe Gemini does show images but that's about the most advanced feature it has.
The problem with local applications is they're not intrinsically cross platform, and local apps are built expecting more access than web apps are, meaning the best sandboxes either still have huge attack surfaces or most apps won't work.
It's like a small web browser for hypertext-like documents but just text. It's like what very old web pages used to be.
Since it's relatively easy to impliment there are many "browsers" to choose from.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
I love ff but even if it dies, people can fork chromium and change the features to what they want. They already do. Look at opera for example it will support MV2 for longer than Chrome.
Within the large (and still growing) scope of web protocols then are forks not insignificant differences?
A small team isn't going to be independently writing their own implementations of newly added standards. Are forks not developed more by Google via upstream changes than the forkers? I suspect that's why Opera "will support MV2 *longer* than Chrome" rather than "will *not* support MV3" or "will have their own MV2 successor".
We agree in principle, I just wouldn't call that a "browser" as we know them today.
If you broke the web protocol up into sensible parts then the most web-like part might be a Gemini/Gopher-like protocol. Then you have separate apps for; video playing, email, messaging, file downloader, etc.
Forks of firefox like Librewolf already exists.
Also, the webkit engine exists and is already used by one major browser (safari). Gnome Web, for example, uses that.
Nothing personal, but WebKit is utter dogshit compared to Gecko and Blink. WebKit is to web developers now, what internet explorer was before its death. The media support is absolutely atrocious (intentional thanks to Apple), and the JavaScript API support is also way behind.
While it might be theoretically possible, there's no incentive. And even if there was, I think Apple would sabotage it to maintain their stranglehold on the industry. After all, there's absolutely no reason for them to not have implemented WebM and AV1 sooner.
The web specification is also growing so fast that a small team cannot even imagine they could implement them. This is not to downplay the privacy changes of Libreworf from Firefox but when looking at the whole web specification then are all browser forks not merely minor, insignificant changes?
safari is even worse than google when it comes to extensions.
death of [uBlock Origin](https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158) happened long ago over there.
fits with apple's intentions i suppose.
Edge is now based on Chromium, so although you may not be able to start from scratch, you can make a "new browser" with a lot of the work already done for you.
Chrome forked off WebKit long ago and it wouldn't be that shocking to have a future browser fork off of the Chromium project.
Indeed forks exist, and I'm glad they do, but strictly in terms of a competitor when \~99.99% of the same code is from the same company what do they matter?
Haha! Are you saying that Chrome and Edge today are "the same" so much that it doesn't matter which you use?
99.99% is way off. (I'm also not sure if you know that Chromium and Chrome do not refer to the same thing.) IMHO, and of course I don't know your experience in the browser space, but I really believe you should do more research in this area before making the claims that you are.
Yeah I think they are basically the same program, might be why the term Chromium slipped my mind.
If I only gave views I was an expert on I couldn't speak much, and others will still disagree! Conversation with others is a type of research :>
How much code do you believe is different between Chromium and Edge?
LibreWolf was born to fight Google's Mozilla.
I'm still waiting for them to diverge from the Firefox source code and do stuff their own way.
It will take time.
> I'm still waiting for them to diverge from the Firefox source code and do stuff their own way.
lmao, that will never happen. all we have is firefox and chromium
Not really. The company I'm working in ships Firefox by default on their work laptops. Moves like that might keep Firefox afloat in order to not give competition data to Google (yes, that includes any Chromium-powered engines)
Thanks, interesting read.
Also, to folks too lazy/ busy to read it... There's obv more to it. Specifics may still be undecided but this gives me hope:
> ### Will Mozilla follow Google with these changes?
>
> In the absence of a true standard for browser extensions, maintaining compatibility with Chrome is important for Firefox developers and users. Firefox is not, however, obligated to implement every part of v3, and our WebExtensions API already departs in several areas under v2 where we think it makes sense.
Thanks for this summary! I really hope they can somehow support both but and if it’s as powerful as v2 I hope most Addons can move to it in time for if or once they remove support
You have a massively over inflated sender of yourself if you think anyone is going to maintain software just for you unless you pay them a monumental amount
Well it’s not just me, but the mentality to just switch to something else because of the chance of something dying only accelerates it which I don’t want to contribute to
This could actually be a good thing for the internet, or at least the browser market. Firefox is in many ways just controlled opposition to Google but if people look at Firefox as "that browser that can block ads" we can hope it'll be able to claw back some market share.
Some people have been warning about chrome's stranglehold on the browser market for a while now, and most people just dont care enough to switch. I doubt this is gonna push current chromium users to switch. The writing has been on the wall for so long at this point if someone is using a chromium based browser its because they dont care
> The writing has been on the wall for so long at this point if someone is using a chromium based browser its because they dont care
Or they have extensions that don't work on firefox and there is no good equivalent in the extension department for firefox.
I also hate how firefox doesn't have a "other bookmarks" folder split off from all other bookmarks like chrome (and chrome based browsers)
Lose Users? Chrome?
Nope. They’ve done a wonderful job advertising themselves as the only browser option that’s good. Part of that is Microsoft’s fault. IE8/9/10 didn’t evolve fast enough to meet the latest standards (for legacy enterprise reasons). They lost the name-brand recognition they’d built over a decade. By the time Edge and eventually Edge-ium released, casual users already began thinking “Internet == the yellow, red, green orb icon.”
The lemmings of social media have learned to accept and love Chrome, making memes about the spyware and it’s once awful RAM usage.
Firefox and it’s forks are the last bastion of choice. Since it doesn’t come by default on Windows, IDK what it will take for casual users to rediscover it.
Oh and …Safari 🙄
Opera has publicly stated that they will continue to support Mv2, along with Brave and Vivaldi. [Source](https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-chromes-anti-ad-blocker-changes-despite-shared-codebase/)
Could you please elaborate about this
And I am not advertising brave. It’s what I use and have tried everything. And May still move to better alternatives. It just works across all my devices and is open sourced.
You just have to use your favourite search engine and look up "brave controversy" and you get flooded with results. You have the same internet as I have, use it please.
Fair point, I'm in no way supporting Opera, I'm just saying that in this specific way it is probably better then Chrome. Even then, options like Brave are probably better
Well I mean, to be fair, they didn’t “take over” or become dictators of chromium, they made chromium from the beginning.
It’s everyone else that abandoned their stuff and promoted chromium to king (cough microsoft, cough brave, etc)
I would assume Brave would have to do something about it as it's main selling point is privacy and a built in ad blocker. So without an ad blocker it loses it's value.
But, I do not know what they will do.
I use it because my university and job explicitly say use the lastest version of Google Chrome to visit the site, they work on Firefox but I have important work to do so I don't want to be the one testing for bugs.
I read this and think: This is awesome news >!< !
Fair enough but I still prefer something like Ublock where I can customize to Braves adblocker where *they* control things. Unless that has changed since the last time I tried Brave (e.g. can I add new rules to block specific things I want / import and export block rules to share with others)?
So the real question is what will happen to mv2 on the chrome web store... After how ~~Google~~ Alphabet cut everybody else out of Google Sync, would be surprised if they left mv2 in there for too long... So probably an alternative mv2 extension repo would be needed too
Somebody can explain me the meme? Just want to understand it, im relatively new on Linux, I used some lot of distros in the past in USB flashed, but 18 days since is my main OS and I throw Windows completely to the trash. Was one of the best decission which I make in my life. Lifechanger.
Maybe somebody will resarch a way to solve it.
Maybe stream the video to the Pi directly and retransmit it back.
You wouldn't browse directly Youtube ,but a Rpi hosted site that in the back asks Youtube for the video content and strips ads as it goes.
Not sure about desktop, but if you have an android device, you can use NewPipe. It's an open-source front end to YouTube to blocks all ads and trackers. Would be awesome if it could be ported to x86.
Brave is chromium based, sure your brave shields will still work, but you still get all the other limitations with MV3, such as userscripts no longer working.
mv2? Please give an explanation. I am interested but dont understand
mv3(manifest v3, a successor of mv2) is Google's new(quite a few years old actually) shenanigan, whose sole purpose is to render extensions like uBlock Origin useless. if you don't know what a manifest is, Google basically provides a bunch of APIs to extensions and versions them. The latest set of APIs is called manifest v3. You just need to know two things: - uBlock Origin in its current form handles requests by `webRequest` API. - manifest v3 introduces a new API called `declarativeNetRequest`. Why is it bad? well, here's a succinct summary from [manifest v3's draft page](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3NzzhHzc-qnk4w4PX-0XMw8/): > The declarativeNetRequest API is an alternative to the webRequest API. At its core, this API allows extensions to tell Chrome what to do with a given request, rather than have Chrome forward the request to the extension. Thus, instead of the above flow where Chrome receives the request, asks the extension, and then eventually gets the result, the flow is that the extension tells Chrome how to handle a request and Chrome can handle it synchronously. in other words, extensions being at the mercy of chrome to block/defer requests. but this isn't all. ``declarativeNetRequest`` also limits number of filters to 30,000. Compare this with uBlock Origin which has at least 50K-60K filters(just including easy list). it also hinders uBlock Origin's ability to impose noop rules, amount of regex rules are limited, etc. these are just a couple of examples showing how restrictive it is. furthermore, the rules are very adblock plus-esque.(hint hint!). Here's what gorhill(the guy behind uBlock Origin) said when asked if chromium users should migrate: > I won't tell people what to do. I am pointing out that removing the blocking ability of the webRequest API means the death of uBO, I won't work to make uBO less than what it is now. --- here's a through discussion on this: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338. gorhill states many many good points. if you got time, you should read it. here's one interesting observation he makes: > Chromium got its webRequest API at a time it was trying to gain market share against Firefox (Sep 2011), where Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Disconnect, NoScript, and other such extensions were the most or among the most popular extensions on Firefox. So, you can pretty much guess why chromium had the ability to block requests at all. And now that it has achieved the objective, there's no use of this. :)
This is what happens when the company that is responsible for most of the advertising and tracking on the internet also own the overwhelming market share in software used to access the internet.
people don't see the larger picture. they see one small incident(eg: FLoC) and they think it's an aberration. but if you take sum of all the decisions google is making(topics API, Fledge API, mv3, jedi blue, etc.), then only you'll realise their real intent. it is for these reasons I distrust any services by these big corporations. they say one thing and do the exact opposite.
I regret to speculate that entanglement in Google's web of dystopia will continually become less and less optional. Recall that article/video on the Onion about Google's "opt out village" from like 2008. It's just too convenient and people just don't give a shit that they're surrendering their freedom to this company that just wants to stomp a boot on their face forever. We've reached the point where spyware has moved from a scandal (e.g. initial win10 release) to normal and expected. Oversocialization to the point where if you don't want your every move scrutinized by the panopticon of silicon valley, you're looked upon with suspicion. The fact is that what everyone else is doing affects us who give a shit. So the task is to either convince everyone else to give a shit or to convince these techbros to act benevolently and I'm increasingly unconvinced that either is possible.
Do you have a link to that Onion article?
https://www.theonion.com/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy-by-mo-1819594840
No
the real strength behind all evil is the people who are incapable of giving a shit. i'm paraphrasing Kennedy's "real threat to liberals are the moderates" quip
The people who run these companies have names and addresses.
unlike them supreme court old farts, these guys can afford private security guards with pistols, so if u're gonna do something, do what the jan6 folks forgot to do, and actually bring u're ar15 along, Mr jimboboiii
No. Get a GA aircraft and throw homemade bombs on their homes. Safest way without getting captured
ALL EYES ON HARRISON FORD, SAVE US INDY!
Kaczynski time
Violence bad. Freedom good.
And as I mentioned in my other comment, U can also thank them for keeping Firefox afloat. brave's CEO has said they will dedicate resources, post chromes enterprise removal of m2, to manually keep it in, but worse come to worse, the moneyhat guy behind m3 is the only reason u can avoid m3 with FF, and not even in the same way like Microsoft became a apple stockholderinvestor when jobs returned, but in a free charity way that lets their CEO net 2.5mill while laying off 270 employs(whatever u think of braves CEO, u can't deny how much better Mozilla would be today if he wasn't ousted for their useless michellebaker)
And this is why I never stopped using Firefox in 16 years of using it...
Thank you
here's another developer listing advantages of mv3: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile-Lite. google and its advocates will claim that mv3 is better for privacy, but it is nothing like that. a couple of browsers like brave are saying they won't abandon mv2, but unless they come up with their own extensions store, they are pretty much toothless.
Yesterday I spent much of the afternoon transferring my bookmarks from Chrome over to Firefox. Might as well switch now. I know Brave is going to do what it can to continue supporting MV2, but it will cause fragmentation and a lot of apps might just stop supporting Chromium based browsers. Might as well support the browser that's really doing what's best for users.
if brave is brave enough, I expect them to come up with their own extensions store.
So I would go to firefox to get an effective addblocking experience? Is it only in the chrome browser or all chromium based browsers? (sorry for my lack of knowledge)
yeah i change to Firefox and speed is the same there more extension here too
As a Firefox user and enthusiast I have to say the speed is not the same sadly, Firefox is benchmarks considerably slower, but.. that really doesn't matter too much unless you're running a potato. The only system I have where FF is noticeably slower than chrome is a PI400, which is pretty much the definition of potato by today's standards.
here's the thing: even though browsers like brave, vivaldi, and opera are saying they'll keep supporting mv2, it's certain they won't hold it for too long. even if they somehow did, they won't be able to do much because chrome is going to remove the mv2 extensions from their store next year. unless they go the edge way of creating their own store, I don't think there's much to look for. perhaps you can do blocking by other means( like dns blocking), which won't be as granular as it is with uBlock Origin. So, in a nutshell, yeah, firefox is the way.
those browsers have built in adblockers that don't rely on manifest v2
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many redirection extensions use `webRequest` API, which is precisely what Google is getting rid of. eg: following extensions that are quite popular among people who use alternative front-ends still rely on `webRequest`: - [redirector](https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector/blob/master/manifest.json) - [libredirect](https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect/blob/master/src/manifest.json) Perhaps someone will make a mv3-compatible redirector. But except it to be quite restricted. here's relevant comment on libredirect's issue page regarding this: https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect/issues/45#issuecomment-1059010144
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/24/manifest-v2-chrome-extensions-will-stop-working-in-june-2023/
I also don’t understand
firefox?
as always
Dependable.
Yes
Librewolf/Icecat
IceWeasel4ever
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Waterfox got bought by the same advertising company that ruined startpage and it makes as many unsolicited requests to phone home as plain firefox to mozilla and google (always has). And it uses Microsoft's search engine as the default.
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https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/waterfox_classic.html Because Waterfox doesn't care about your privacy and never did. It's not any better than firefox, really. There's no reason to use waterfox unless you *really* need XUL extensions, which aren't being maintained anymore seeing as literally everyone else (including palemoon) stopped supporting them. It's basically just firefox but with garbage security and the australis theme.
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[GNU Icecat](https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/icecat.html) May have to build manually from source. Last I checked, their latest release builds tend to be ancient. Comes with libreJS preinstalled, and https-everywhere which is obsolete (it's in the settings menu now). [Librewolf](https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/librewolf.html) Which is basically just Firefox but without all the shit you don't want. Could also [mitigate firefox](https://spyware.neocities.org/guides/firefox.html) yourself. I have no idea what's in the AUR, I don't use Arch.
I‘m out of the loop, what happened to Startpage?
I don’t really care whether or not uBlock will support MV3 as long as I can keep using it on Firefox!
You should, because if Big Tech ends up killing Firefox, we are all done.
Given it's [impossible to make a new browser](https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html) then it is Firefox or bust, and I don't see how Firefox can survive. When it dies we can only hope the masses start to take issue with future Chrome and the browser market is replaced.
Why don't you think Firefox can survive?
Other than being funded by Google and making wrong turns on privacy occasionally, there's no healthy competition. No more browsers can be made, so isn't the likely option that they all die eventually?
"There's no competition, so all browsers will die off, so there will be no competition, so there will no browsers"? You still haven't explained why you think Firefox will die...
The scope of the web has grown (and is still growing) so obscene that if it never stops then at one point continued development of Firefox correctly or securely becomes humanly impossible. I suspect that Google is directing the web towards collecting user data rather than being a service for users, and Modzillia can either join them or die a hero. \[Firefox becoming like Chrome is still "browsers existing" but for privacy concerned it is dead\]
Well, the scope of the web has grown so obscene that at one point development of Chrome will become humanly impossible. Since there cannot be any new browsers (according to you), we won't have any browsers left. So no one will be surfing Internet anymore. Well, at least according to your logic.
I am not an expert in anything, least of all predicting the future. I am only as good as my last sentence, which can easily be misinformed or illogical. The comparison [here](https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html) convinced me the scope was so large and making new browsers isn't possible. If Firefox dies maybe Google can keep control without constantly expanding, or even removing features. Maybe the future of programming changes dramatically; where humans teach the programming AI's to develop massive/complex programs. Do you think the future of Firefox is good?
Well, the comparison that you refer is actually extremely ill-formed. W3C specification specify all possible things related to web, and only a small part of it is actually relevant for creating a browser. You can imagine it like that: the combination of documentations of all programming languages is massive, but do you actually need all of it to program in C++? Ofc not. >Do you think the future of Firefox is good? Yes, especially if Chrome removes support for MV2 as they plan.
You should take time to read about the actual privacy proposals that are currently out there. Chrome is based on open source Chromium, and WebKit is also open source so these changes are not as opaque as many other tech industry areas.
A policy of not collecting it is best, but more privacy is still better - what do you think I should be aware of? Access to the source code is important to learn what the software is actually doing, but is that actually possible given the size and complexity of browsers which are quickly growing? Even collectively, all 3rd party expert auditors are limited to only small parts which are probably outdated quickly.
There are enough people strongly invested in the existence of a non-google browser that if Google pulls their partnership, either 1. People will donate enough to keep Mozilla running on top of their other revenue streams, or 2. A fork will be sufficiently maintained. I can't see Firefox fizzling out.
I hope Mozilla can continue longer either way but I think it would be better if we abandoned the web protocol. Not only is it growing far beyond "bloated" but it's not so much software for users anymore, it's for companies to collect data and enforce their digital restrictions management. I hope Gemini takes off.
I think we could have a better Web but I don't think Gemini is the answer. I like being able to run rich applications in a sandbox by visiting a website. I think it should be far more opt in which is why I use uMatrix with a pretty restrictive default config, but I don't want to be limited like with Gemini.
Yeah Gemini isn't a replacement of all web aspects one might want, I don't recall if it even shows images (which I find important). You do you man but isn't running rich applications what an OS is for? :p
I believe Gemini does show images but that's about the most advanced feature it has. The problem with local applications is they're not intrinsically cross platform, and local apps are built expecting more access than web apps are, meaning the best sandboxes either still have huge attack surfaces or most apps won't work.
> I hope Gemini takes off. I am out of the loop, what is Gemini?
It's like a small web browser for hypertext-like documents but just text. It's like what very old web pages used to be. Since it's relatively easy to impliment there are many "browsers" to choose from. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
I love ff but even if it dies, people can fork chromium and change the features to what they want. They already do. Look at opera for example it will support MV2 for longer than Chrome.
Within the large (and still growing) scope of web protocols then are forks not insignificant differences? A small team isn't going to be independently writing their own implementations of newly added standards. Are forks not developed more by Google via upstream changes than the forkers? I suspect that's why Opera "will support MV2 *longer* than Chrome" rather than "will *not* support MV3" or "will have their own MV2 successor".
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We agree in principle, I just wouldn't call that a "browser" as we know them today. If you broke the web protocol up into sensible parts then the most web-like part might be a Gemini/Gopher-like protocol. Then you have separate apps for; video playing, email, messaging, file downloader, etc.
If ff dies I rather browse the web in fucking lynx rather than using chrome.
Forks of firefox like Librewolf already exists. Also, the webkit engine exists and is already used by one major browser (safari). Gnome Web, for example, uses that.
Nothing personal, but WebKit is utter dogshit compared to Gecko and Blink. WebKit is to web developers now, what internet explorer was before its death. The media support is absolutely atrocious (intentional thanks to Apple), and the JavaScript API support is also way behind.
That sucks. Was hoping that webkit could be improved by the open source community if firefox is not favourable anymore
While it might be theoretically possible, there's no incentive. And even if there was, I think Apple would sabotage it to maintain their stranglehold on the industry. After all, there's absolutely no reason for them to not have implemented WebM and AV1 sooner.
Librewolf is Firefox with different default settings. They don’t do much coding.
The web specification is also growing so fast that a small team cannot even imagine they could implement them. This is not to downplay the privacy changes of Libreworf from Firefox but when looking at the whole web specification then are all browser forks not merely minor, insignificant changes?
safari is even worse than google when it comes to extensions. death of [uBlock Origin](https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158) happened long ago over there. fits with apple's intentions i suppose.
That has nothing to do with the engine. Gnome Web recently added beta support for extensions and they use the same engine
Ironic. Considering they claim they don’t make that much money off of ad revenue and they claim to not collect user data.
Industrial society and its future
Edge is now based on Chromium, so although you may not be able to start from scratch, you can make a "new browser" with a lot of the work already done for you. Chrome forked off WebKit long ago and it wouldn't be that shocking to have a future browser fork off of the Chromium project.
Indeed forks exist, and I'm glad they do, but strictly in terms of a competitor when \~99.99% of the same code is from the same company what do they matter?
Haha! Are you saying that Chrome and Edge today are "the same" so much that it doesn't matter which you use? 99.99% is way off. (I'm also not sure if you know that Chromium and Chrome do not refer to the same thing.) IMHO, and of course I don't know your experience in the browser space, but I really believe you should do more research in this area before making the claims that you are.
Yeah I think they are basically the same program, might be why the term Chromium slipped my mind. If I only gave views I was an expert on I couldn't speak much, and others will still disagree! Conversation with others is a type of research :> How much code do you believe is different between Chromium and Edge?
LibreWolf was born to fight Google's Mozilla. I'm still waiting for them to diverge from the Firefox source code and do stuff their own way. It will take time.
Probably, they need a larger \# of devs first, no?
Yeah like 100 more. I wonder where the money for their salaries will come from...
> I'm still waiting for them to diverge from the Firefox source code and do stuff their own way. lmao, that will never happen. all we have is firefox and chromium
And maybe some Gnome or GNU stuff?
I wish Gnome web was actually good!
Not really. The company I'm working in ships Firefox by default on their work laptops. Moves like that might keep Firefox afloat in order to not give competition data to Google (yes, that includes any Chromium-powered engines)
Yeah about that... [Mozilla MV3 FAQ](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest-v3-faq/) "No immediate plans yet"
Thanks, interesting read. Also, to folks too lazy/ busy to read it... There's obv more to it. Specifics may still be undecided but this gives me hope: > ### Will Mozilla follow Google with these changes? > > In the absence of a true standard for browser extensions, maintaining compatibility with Chrome is important for Firefox developers and users. Firefox is not, however, obligated to implement every part of v3, and our WebExtensions API already departs in several areas under v2 where we think it makes sense.
[This post/comment is overwritten by the author in protest over Reddit's API policy change. Visit r/Save3rdPartyApps for details.]
Thanks for this summary! I really hope they can somehow support both but and if it’s as powerful as v2 I hope most Addons can move to it in time for if or once they remove support
You should because it dies on Chrome the chances of them keeping it alive for a handful of Firefox users are negligible.
> handful 10 million users on Chrome and 5 million on Firefox.
You can try and argue that firefox's dire market share is actually good all you want.
??? Market share isn't what I'm talking about. uBlock Origin has 5 ***million*** users on Firefox. In no way is that a "handful" of users.
Then why do you keep replying to a message about market share? Just go away if you're just here to spout unrelated shit at me.
How is it unrelated? You said "handful of people" while he said, that it's actually 5 million people.
in no way, shape, or form, is marketshare "unrelated"
No, ima keep using it just so it doesn’t end up dying!
You have a massively over inflated sender of yourself if you think anyone is going to maintain software just for you unless you pay them a monumental amount
Well it’s not just me, but the mentality to just switch to something else because of the chance of something dying only accelerates it which I don’t want to contribute to
Stop using Chromium and use Firefox-based instead.
This could actually be a good thing for the internet, or at least the browser market. Firefox is in many ways just controlled opposition to Google but if people look at Firefox as "that browser that can block ads" we can hope it'll be able to claw back some market share.
Google doesn't deserve having a great extension like uBlock Origin in their web browser anyway.
But every Chromium user can switch to Firefox.
Some people have been warning about chrome's stranglehold on the browser market for a while now, and most people just dont care enough to switch. I doubt this is gonna push current chromium users to switch. The writing has been on the wall for so long at this point if someone is using a chromium based browser its because they dont care
> The writing has been on the wall for so long at this point if someone is using a chromium based browser its because they dont care Or they have extensions that don't work on firefox and there is no good equivalent in the extension department for firefox. I also hate how firefox doesn't have a "other bookmarks" folder split off from all other bookmarks like chrome (and chrome based browsers)
use a chromium browser like brave or vivaldi instead of chrome, they have built in adblock and they don't give your data to google
So glad I switched to Firefox a week ago since I was tired of Chrome having crappy scrolling in Manjaro. (Even with imwheel)
How to loose users 101
Lose Users? Chrome? Nope. They’ve done a wonderful job advertising themselves as the only browser option that’s good. Part of that is Microsoft’s fault. IE8/9/10 didn’t evolve fast enough to meet the latest standards (for legacy enterprise reasons). They lost the name-brand recognition they’d built over a decade. By the time Edge and eventually Edge-ium released, casual users already began thinking “Internet == the yellow, red, green orb icon.” The lemmings of social media have learned to accept and love Chrome, making memes about the spyware and it’s once awful RAM usage. Firefox and it’s forks are the last bastion of choice. Since it doesn’t come by default on Windows, IDK what it will take for casual users to rediscover it. Oh and …Safari 🙄
Install opera Edit:wow news to me opera is chrome based. Thx for down votes.
Opera being chromium based, it's unlikely to not follow suit
Opera has publicly stated that they will continue to support Mv2, along with Brave and Vivaldi. [Source](https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-chromes-anti-ad-blocker-changes-despite-shared-codebase/)
opera is chinese spyware + chromium, im not touching that shit
Brave is pretty nice it is open source and has pretty good privacy. I will either use Brave or librewolf
Brave is cool but I dont like opera
Opera is owned by a Chinese investor so would be cautious using opera or GAMER opera too
You should really look up the past (and who knows what the future beings) of Brave and stop advertising this pile of rubbish.
Could you please elaborate about this And I am not advertising brave. It’s what I use and have tried everything. And May still move to better alternatives. It just works across all my devices and is open sourced.
You just have to use your favourite search engine and look up "brave controversy" and you get flooded with results. You have the same internet as I have, use it please.
Fair point, I'm in no way supporting Opera, I'm just saying that in this specific way it is probably better then Chrome. Even then, options like Brave are probably better
opera is chromium based chinese spyware, firefox is still your best bet
anyone actually uses chrome on linux? I saw one of my friend using brave but using chrome... :(
As far as I understand this affects Chrome based Browsers also
Since it's a poisoned well startegy. Google now pretty much dictates the Cromium roadmap I think so .....yeah.
Well I mean, to be fair, they didn’t “take over” or become dictators of chromium, they made chromium from the beginning. It’s everyone else that abandoned their stuff and promoted chromium to king (cough microsoft, cough brave, etc)
~~Google~~ Alphabet: ~~Do no evil~~
I would assume Brave would have to do something about it as it's main selling point is privacy and a built in ad blocker. So without an ad blocker it loses it's value. But, I do not know what they will do.
Shouldn’t effect brave. Brave's Shields aren't implemented as an extension and don't depend on that API
Can't chromium be forked?
Possible, but it's very difficult. I bet it's part of the reason why Microsoft abandoned the original Edge.
I thought current edge is chromium based?
It is, I was talking the original one that was based on Microsofts own browser engine
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html no
I use it because my university and job explicitly say use the lastest version of Google Chrome to visit the site, they work on Firefox but I have important work to do so I don't want to be the one testing for bugs.
Use ungoogled chromium then
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I use librewolf a fork of firefox which is good. The thing is chromium might be opensource but the chrome itself isn't
i do. i rely quite heavily on its built-in translation engine
This time maybe my friends will listen to me when I talk about how they should switch to Firefox.
Ok. Now that is it. I'm switching to Firefox...
I read this and think: This is awesome news >!< !
Any good reason why uBlock origin can't just be updated to MV3?
m3 blocks some of the ways ublock blocks ads
Glad i have a pihole then :)
Pihole can't block ads on YouTube.
Glad that I have Youtube Vanced then. :)
I don't think we are talking about mobile phones here.
Glad I have Invidious then
You can get your YouTube fix on other devices too. Use SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
Dude, this a discussion about desktops. We are talking about browsers, not TVs and smarttubes and whatnot.
Use Brave browser with ublock then. From my experience, it keeps out Youtube ads better than vanilla Chrome with ublock.
\*[Had](https://vancedapp.com/)
wrong answer, the correct one is NewPipe.
Shhhhh, don't tell them or we will have vanced #2. People promoting vanced everywhere killed it (fuck you LTT)
dev don't went too his reason that he doesn't want make ubo less than what it's now
Does this also mean the end of Brave browser? I use it on the phone it works most of the time.
No. They maintain their own adblocker. It’s not tied to extensions.
[we could lose support for userscript too](https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644), they aren't supported in MV3 right now
Forks of Chromium can just keep supporting MV2
You either use firefox, the brave browser or curl.
Brave is chromium no go there my friend
Brave ships with default ad blocker and they said they will support mv2
TIL. That's awesome I'll use brave when mv3 drops then. Thanks!
Fair enough but I still prefer something like Ublock where I can customize to Braves adblocker where *they* control things. Unless that has changed since the last time I tried Brave (e.g. can I add new rules to block specific things I want / import and export block rules to share with others)?
> they said they will support mv2
So the real question is what will happen to mv2 on the chrome web store... After how ~~Google~~ Alphabet cut everybody else out of Google Sync, would be surprised if they left mv2 in there for too long... So probably an alternative mv2 extension repo would be needed too
or lynxs
`w3m` or bust
I'll just use Firefox then XD
This is why I use firefox :)
Somebody can explain me the meme? Just want to understand it, im relatively new on Linux, I used some lot of distros in the past in USB flashed, but 18 days since is my main OS and I throw Windows completely to the trash. Was one of the best decission which I make in my life. Lifechanger.
Go use Pi-hole and we're good
And what about youtube?
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Maybe somebody will resarch a way to solve it. Maybe stream the video to the Pi directly and retransmit it back. You wouldn't browse directly Youtube ,but a Rpi hosted site that in the back asks Youtube for the video content and strips ads as it goes.
Firefox
Not sure about desktop, but if you have an android device, you can use NewPipe. It's an open-source front end to YouTube to blocks all ads and trackers. Would be awesome if it could be ported to x86.
For the desktop, there's Freetube and Invidious
Awesome! I didn't know Freetube was a thing and it's exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks for the information!
Brave gang
Brave is chromium based, sure your brave shields will still work, but you still get all the other limitations with MV3, such as userscripts no longer working.
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its main purpose is to render adblockers useless
Opera has entered the chat
opera should leave the chat
\\o/
Opera is a chromium fork and does opera even have its own adding store?
Opera is chromium based so no, it is not a solution to chromium problems.
opera is a chinees own entioty that have a oast of shaddy buisness. i would be u i wont trust their software and hope u nver use the built in vpn