For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
Yet another reason to switch to brave…oh wait…brave is built on chromium so…will adblocker of brave also cease to exist? Will it get blocked too? Vivaldi ad blockers may stop too as afaik its based on opera engine
Yet another reason to switch to brave
There is no good reasons to use brave. It’s based on chromium, propped up by suspicious individuals, uses predatory marketing tactics and have an history of not caring very much for privacy in favor of hijacking and inserting referrals. And that’s only the most prominent issues. Their last stunt of willingly adding annoying features and offering people to pay to remove them should tell you all you need to know.
Without those, what can you recommend to someone who is not tech-savvy but willing to learn?
There is no good reasons to use brave
I use it because it has Tor and Web3 components built-in.
Oh look all the “chrome but in a different outfit” browsers are doing the same terrible shit? What a shocker, no one could have predicted that the many many things all on the same base where actuality just fake competition.
Firefox has webserial support now. I no longer need anything chromium. Let them rot.
It does? Guess I can finally yeet Chromium from my machine then.
What is it used for?
Communicating with external devices via USB or the old D-Sub connectors.
Printers, microcontrollers, instruments, etc… Directly instead of through the OS.
Notably, ESPHome Programmer uses it for flashing ESP32s wired. Other companies like Solo Motor Controllers use it for delivering a user GUI to customers that is always updated but that can switch between versions instantly for production without having to having to deal with window’s broken method of having to manually search and download .exes for every program.
never heard of it till now. neat!
Even grapheneOS use it for adb into your phone to flash the images.
webserial
they use WebUSB in GrapheneOS
Really? Holy shit I can switch to zen fully at work and at home and uninstall chromium. Webserial was literally the only thing I needed
It’s a damn shame, I’ve always liked Vivaldi otherwise. I’ve been dual running Vivaldi and Firefox for years now, Vivaldi for casual browsing and Firefox for more serious stuff + YouTube.
Oh well, it’s time to do a full switch, I guess.
Kinda funny, I’ve been doing the exact same thing with Win/Linux for approximately the same length of time. Needed Win because of dome software that just doesn’t work linux, and sadly, I still do.
Google and Microsoft can go fuck each other with a frozen cactus for all I care.
The folks at Vivaldi have been doing some work on their internal ad blocker, I think with the intention to bring most of the functionality of uBo internally so that it doesn’t have to be an extension. Not sure how far along they are, but maybe they’re intentionally keeping it quiet.
Aye, I’m just not sure how it’s going to play out. One can hope, though. It’s definitely one of the best options Chrome-wise either way.
I’m wondering what the decision making was when they were starting (which is now 10 years ago already, times flies, yo).
From today’s perspective a Firefox fork sounds way more logical. Back then maybe things with Blink/Chromium weren’t looking so grim, maybe they were relying on the experience of that part of the team that moved over from Opera…
They are all chrome with google scratched out and their name written in sharpie in its place.
Of course they are all doing it, cause they are all the same thing.
All the FF forks are the same. Soft forks.
They don’t even try to pretend to fight it.
because theres no fighting google.
Microsoft tried, and google won, which is why Edge became a chrome reskin instead of what it was before.
Microsoft “tried” about as well as a quadraplegic “tries” free climbing
Everything dies.
Yeah, but the worse they are the longer they live apparently.
Luckily, that’s something you can change!
To avoid a visit by the FBI, I will say no its not.
The winning move is not to do business with them, don’t compete just exist and pretend they don’t exist. Microslop played the game and lost, but it is a stupid silly game.
kinda hard to do when google holds the internet by the balls. and can twist at any moment to get what they want.
Microsoft and Mozilla employees have both accused them of doing this in the past, to sabotage non-chrome browsers on google services, to make chrome look better and drive users to chrome.
They only ‘hold the internet by the balls’ if you are using and reliant on Google products.
There are hundreds (if not more) tutorials and lists online to guide you through degoogling
News to me, Does google hold this site by the balls? They have a lot of power yes, but they are not some unsinkable boat.
When will marketing people figure out our generation views ads as hostile, non-consensual, and unwanted? They are a negative way to introduce us to your product/service. I actively avoid things with obnoxious ads. Native, old spice, liberty mutual, all of those brands the first thing that comes to mind is the negative experience of an invasive advertisement I never fucking asked for.
Except we are not customers, and it’s the customers that are important. I’s like cows asking between themselves when will the butcher realize that they do not like being killed for meat.
Butcher knows, but butcher doesn’t sell comfort to cows, he sells meat to customers.
What generation?
When will marketing people figure out our generation views ads as hostile, non-consensual, and unwanted?
Who knows. I was at the beach this past weekend and there were two different planes flying ad banners in front of me.
What the fuck. That’s two different local businesses that I have noted I will actively avoid.
Can’t even unplug and face a clear sky without getting ads shoved in your fucking face.
It doesn’t matter how we view them as long as they work.
They’re too busy milking the boomers for now (and even then, the smart ones also despise ads already)
Pretty sure all generations feel the same way.
people still use chrome?, with all thier bs with adblocking and incognito like almost 7 years ago.
I only used Electron or CEF apps usually.
Still? It has like 95% of market share.
“Only” 70%, though of course the point stands.
High time to leave that ship if you have not done that already.
That fucking banchode running Alphabet.
Fine. I propose we create a proxy for hostile web browsers. Install the proxy on your device to run locally. Browser tells proxy to fetch the page. Proxy unfucks it before handing it over to the browser. Someone likely already has something like this out there somewhere.
If they want to turn this into an arms race they absolutely will lose.
I actually believe this is an unwinnable scenario for clients. Just whenever the block app/db updates, automatically check if ads are blocked. If they are, have an engineer or AI iterate until it no longer is the case.
And the reason why blocking solutions can’t do the same is that there’s cery kittle money in it and not enough people working for free on it. Or that’s atleast my hypothesis…
Cue the Brave shills “recommending” to switch to Brave in 5…4…3…
Wait what’s wrong with Brave?
Brave is by a company who’s in the business of serving ads.
Much like google was back in the day, they’re trying to obtain market share with a product that they can easily manipulate after the fact and rely on people not jumping ship as things get progressively worse and worse bit by bit
Think of the “approved ads” era followed by the “enhanced security features” which made it so your block list couldn’t be updated at a moments notice and now it’s being stripped entirely.
Better to avoid it entirely and just use Firefox or a derivative thereof
It’s not firefox
Firefox doesn’t have tab groups on mobile
“Firefox doesn’t have this one feature I like so I will keep using browser made by an ad company. I’m sure there will be no consequences long term”.
Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin
“Oh shit. No one could have predicted this!”.
You may have a browsing addiction if you need tab groups on mobile, wow…
I swear I hate tabbed browsing, because it leads to people hording tabs like a freaking squirrel hordes nuts.
If you need it for later, book mark it.
If you’re done with it close it.
Added to nightly somewhat recently.
It is also chromium based, so stands to get the same nerf.
Nope, Shields are built into the browser itself, not as an extension which uses those APIs. [1]
Yeap, just a matter of time.
I would argue that if you’re choosing between chrome and brave, brave is still better.
Brave has a certain distasteful reputation earned by repeated unethical fuckery. If you are fine with what brave does, you have no reason to avoid chrome in the first place.
Sure. Probably. But why are we choosing between Chrome and Brave?
On iOS you can go on pornhub on brave and it blocks all the ads and cookie popups.
That’s one reason that uh… “someone” might use brave.
People entirely blind to the idea that they can just choose something else instead of 2 piles of shit, one of which has a cherry on top and was sprayed with perfume recently.
Its like some sort of awful american tradition at this point.
Because Firefox is a different engine and might not work well with certain websites.
I’ve only ever encountered one website where Firefox didnt work.
and that was because the website was coded maliciously to reject firefox… a plugin to make it think firefox was chrome and suddenly it ran fine.
Well I did, the Amazon Prime Video has many weird behaviors on Firefox compared to the Chromium engine, even YouTube used to have before.
Any web developer knows it isn’t as simple as “code once, work everywhere”. If companies don’t test on Firefox (which is a reality nowadays given its small market share) bugs happen in very weird and unusual ways.
Only issue I’ve ever had with Amazon Video was the fact they artificially limit resolution to 320p for people on linux, regardless of browser.
Couldn’t use just set the user agent?
For a lot of people, it’s an easy transition.
DDG, Vivaldi, etc. harder transitions.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
I’m just saying perfect is the enemy of good.
After seeing all the people talking about Vivaldi in this thread I figured I’d try it out…got to the “Panel” setup page, saw there’s one for reddit, maybe I’ll try adding lemmy.zip…
Failed Cloudflare check in panel, but it worked in a tab…okay, weird.
Thought about checking out Kagi since now privacy is on my mind…the front page would reload every 5 seconds so I couldn’t read about it. It’d say “Verification failed please try again” and refresh.
Apparently this has been an issue with Vivaldi for some time? I guess this is the future of the web? You try to escape the claws of these giant internet powerhouses and they just…don’t let you?
calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right
Sir, 2000s called and asked you to return this argument back.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
Very difficult to believe. I have had issues with Firefox over the years but in every sing[e instance it was a resu[t of my custom setup. The browser has no major compatibility issues out of the box. I think it’s way more likely your parents are technologically illiterate and confuse other problems or gaps in their knowledge as issues with the “new” thing (in this case, the browser).
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
Sorry, what? If they are so tech-illiterate that they have to call you and ask why the website is not working, then what kind of web sites are they visiting?
Been using FF since 2022 and the only sites that wont work are the ones that utilizes HID. Are your parents trying to flash custom firmware for their phones though browser every third day?
Good for you. I’ve been in tech for over 16 years and FF absolutely does not work well on ~25% of websites.
Been in tech longer then that (if for some reason we are doing that now) and I will officially call bullshit on that claim.
Wait, really? The access cripplers are crazily powerful add-ons for the paranoid, like NoScript, not the browser itself. Like what example websites, specifically?
Wanna link those websites so we can see?
I get it that tech people stumble upon these sites much more often than non-techies. My point was that if your parents are having website issues every other day (which implies they are not tech-savvy), then why would they even visit sites that are not FF-compatible. How many sites out of all the web do you think are not compatible with FF? Give an example of a normie site that wont work well with FF.
On the other hand, if your parents are tech-savvy then why would they ask you why a website wont load properly? Do you get it that your statement counters itself?
What sites are those?
Websites that are actively malicious against firefox, that miraculously work when you have a useragent plugin that makes firefox report that its chrome proving that the site works fine, if the asshole code is removed?
I think this is when @AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com will discreetly not answer or otherwise avoid mentioning the exact websites… (Because there are none)
Yup mostly because I don’t care anymore. You’re all stating the, “it works on my machine” mantra and I don’t care. See my other comments for some examples.
It’s true, unfortunately. Not every 3 days, but once a month I encount these sites.
Change the icon on the desktop to the chrome pinwheel and they’ll never know the difference.
So Brave is a good answer to an absolutely terrible question?
Nothing.
Remember that article awhile back about the FBI recommending you use an adblocker?
That means even the FBI recommends you don’t use Google and Microsoft browsers anymore
So LibreWolf browser it is?
Just about any firefox derivative will do now.
I have liked waterfox.
Yeah, thats what I use with uBlock for Youtube. I can’t get Invidious to be stable enough.
Man, I panicked at first because I have to use Edge at work. But this article clickbaited me, as uBlock origin lite is good enough for most people.
Still, screw Chrome, Edge, and Opera for being such dicks. It’s always those three being the bottom tier browsers…
Can confirm, using Cromite + uBlock Origin Lite + I Still Don’t Care About Cookies.
They’ll have to pry the OG uBlock extension from my Ungoogled Chromium browser’s cold dead hands.
Ah, well that still work?
I use ungoogled chromium… but I assumed ublock would stop working like all the others.
*** laughs in Gecko Fusion ***
I think the other browser in your list have little choice, since they use the chrome rendering engine. Only Firefox still has it’s own engine.
If you are on iPhone, you can use Kagi’s Orion - it is based on Webkit, which is what Safari uses. I have uBlock Origin installed on that browser.
If you rely on the extensions API you have no choice. If those browsers want they can just add ad blocking somehow, the code is open source. In fact Brave has its Shields applied directly in the source code without relying on the extensions API.
laughs in Firefox/Librewolf
The MV3 support in firefox is even stricter than in Chrome. I found that chrome will let you sidestep CSP to make an HTTP request. Firefox won’t.
FF support is getting worse and worse though.
Barely any of the sites I use for work support FF.
Laugh all you want but shit is a bit fucked.
Ladybird is our last best hope and its barely a glimmer.
Fun fact: many sites that say that they don’t support firefox lie, their sites usually support it but they never tested it or they deem firefox “less secure” or some bullshit, but with an useragent spoofer, they will work
(Not all sites ofc)
Fun fact: you don’t seem very bright.
By “support FF” I mean “can be used in firefox or a derivative with comparable features to chrome”.
I think you should read my reply again, slowly
No worries, play store-recaptcha is coming for you too!
Waiting for another player…
PRESS START TO JOIN
?
affects mobile the most obviously… but google’s playbook is to basically have forced telemetry always and enforce integrity of their telemetry, and by extension advertising etc.
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/07/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement/ - this just seems like an ok article for it, I did a simple web search and it came up, but others certainly exist if you dislike the source.
Looking forward to when they remove the old options & force PC users to scan reCAPTCHA QRs:
Those sites will be dead to me :)
QR codes are like the popups of days gone by. With incredibly few exceptions, I refuse to scan them. They are so easy to redirect for nefarious purposes, and you can’t easily inspect the url to know, assuming thats something you even do. Also my phone case covers the camera and it’s a bitch to get open so I’m very choosy with what gets camera time.
On my phone I use URLCheck (available in f-droid). You set it as your default browser app, but instead of opening a browser, it opens a popup where you can see the URL, and use some useful tools like removing tracking parameters or automatically rewriting x.com to xcancel.com. The rewritten URL can then just be forwarded to your actual browser (or whatever app is set up to handle that particular URL).
I still won’t actually open random qr code URLs though, especially not ones from google.
Thats new. Thank you for the tip. Installed!
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Unfortunately, we’re fighting an uphill battle here.
We’d need government regulation “protecting privacy”, instead they seem all too eager to concede that in a futile effort to " protect the children ".
I doubt SearXNG is going to integrate it lmao, and if they do, someone will fork or i will keep using older versions
Zen is excellent.
For people who want an opinionated browser… Yes. They have sponsored shortcuts which cannot be disabled and they ghost out the option to in the settings. If you want to dig around the about:config and tweak things, fine, but I’d rather use a browser I can make my own. Librewolf is excellently bare bones.
Sponsored shortcuts? They don’t have them, i did a clean install only some week ago so i doubt it’s a new thing
I haven’t seen any of those things yet, but I’ll try to keep an eye out. The only one I noticed was a default search engine to Google, but DDG was an easy enough option. I like libre wolf as well, but I’m not a fan of the updating scheme on my system.
Corpo banned it for compatibility with crap code apparently
Government becomes more fascist, tech companies become more fascist.
People don’t like surveillance advertising, and most reject it when given the choice. Unpopular policies are squashed when the people are represented, and the Republican policies and interests of forced and extreme deregulation are being represented here, not the people’s.
That, and I believe advertising is inherently fascistic in the way that it distorts realty, and intrusively attempts to modify thinking with punitive, insulting, and psychologically coercive methods - it is corporate propaganda, and when it is combined with surveillance and purchased by the State, it becomes fascism.
I can’t wait for them to try and make ad-blocking illegal. We’re seeing a similar trend with the age verification firm Yoti “reporting” GrapheneOS users to “the authorities”, whatever the hell that Gestapo bullshit scare-tactic means. If FOSS software and ad-blocking are tools of privacy and freedom from thought manipulation, and those concepts are being attacked by a State-backed corporate entity, then the State no longer represents those values. Chrome, like so much other corporate software that has sunk to surveillance advertising with a healthy side of selling data to the government, is now just another fascist tool to punish democratic resistance.
Freedom from advertising is a human right.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …
~Edward Bernays From his 1928 publication - Propaganda
Edward is the father of modern advertising through psychological manipulation.
He’s the reason bacon and eggs are breakfast.
I am posting this again in such a short time, but The Century of Self is required viewing in my opinion. That asshole you mentioned, Bernays, is one of the prime perpetrators for the state of advertising.
— Anyway, I do highly recommend (for those that haven’t) investing the time and watching The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. It is very illuminating as to how we’ve arrived where we are now with regards to propaganda and advertising which are rooted in the same psychological underpinnings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
It appears to be on Netflix, as well.
I was the one who you posted it to and it’s well worth a watch. I put it at 1.25 speed and that was about right.
Hey there, Pele!
I was going to mention two other docs to you that my friend and I found quite good (though different topics). They are:
I hope you can find them somewhere. If you torrent or what not, they are doubtlessly found there.
Pretty fucked up considering how much malware and scammy bullshit come though ads.
Yep, sorry but not sorry. Advertisements aren’t safe. The industry has been ruined by bad actors and it’s a shame, but also not my problem.
I worked in ads only a few months and learned how fucked that industry was. They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser, sucking as much info as they can. The fact that it hasn’t been regulated to hell is shocking, and truly a failure of all leaders.
They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser
That’s the crazy thing.
You want to show me an image, maybe an animated gif, and link it to your website where you’re selling shit? Fine. Annoying, but fine.
But I don’t care how many crocodile tears they shed about ‘but websites depend on ad income’ – I am not letting random, unvetted advertisers run arbitrary code on my computer. I don’t care if it’s in a sandbox inside a sandbox. Exploits may be found, sandboxes may be escaped. And there’s plenty of trouble they can get into even within their little sandbox, like running a fucking crypto miner or something.
So, yeah. Adblock and noscript everywhere and always.
Yes, they can host a GIF on their server & show it to me with a non-personalized link, & promote it where they believe the average reader might be interested in it. Or some reader(s).
Just show me the ads you’re showing everybody else, and make money from sales of useful things & services.
It’s not even that hard to have targeted ads while still respecting privacy – just base the targeting on the other content on the page, rather than on the user.
Honestly, <looks at current governments> not that shocking.
Internet Browsers store way too much data and have waaaay too many permissions. It’s sickening.
not enough, what they want is personal data to mine. they cant do that in simple terms. meta, glassdoor, indeed , linkden,(plaid) tries to use convoluted mehtods to get you to give up more personal data than you normally would in order to access the rest of the site.(glassdoor and indeed has an additional reason to want you ridentiy)
It’s because people don’t go into these offices with fire and guns. If a bunch of advertising people were slaughtered every few weeks things may get better.
Same goes for collections, eventually no one will want to do the job.
The whole industry is bad actors. The quaint, pastoral idea of actually advertising things you genuinely might want to know about is utterly beyond dead, it died the moment they realized they could use the same pipeline to harvest data and manipulate and control people. Using it for mere advertising is a waste of everyone’s time and resources when they have an option so much more lucrative on the table.
It’s everyone’s problem in a way…
Over 10 years ago someone at my office had their work PC and user drive encrypted with ransomware because of a bad ad injection from one of those job search sites. Thankfully it was limited to nothing critical and incremental backups restore the drive…but hopefully they found a good lead because they were canned.
If they’d had a good ad blocker this would have been a non issue
I work in IT: Pretty much all the malware we deal with comes from ads. I’ve pitched making ad blocking standard but they never go for it, even though it’s clear it would prevent an absolute shit ton of attacks. It’s crazy!
Seriously. If Google really wants to shove ads down our throats, they could at least regulate them so they’re not constantly horny scams. But that would cost them money, oh the humanity.
uBlock dragged its feet supporting MV3 but AdGuard works fine.
uBlock created an entirely different implementation of their extension to work around as much of the bullshit lockdown that MV3 implements.
Adguard (and ublock origin “lite”) work exactly as much(or little) as google thinks it can get away with right now.
MV2 VS MV3 is much more of a change than just the stuff relating to ad blockers, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that a company that makes a large proportion of their revenue through advertising was in full control of the specifications for the “new” MV.
