I'm not sure I agree, I run Brave with the standard ad blocking (agressive on Youtube though) and it has been smooth sailing, no ads. What's wrong with Brave's ad blocker according to you?
Brave's close association with cryptocurrency and Web 3 is also concerning. Most fraud occurs at the endpoints, not in the middle. While the centralized banking system has mechanisms like chargebacks to address fraud, the crypto space lacks such safeguards. Cryptocurrency has limited real-life utility and is largely sustained by con artists looking to scam people. Once people recognize one scheme as a scam, new crypto concepts, like NFT games, are quickly invented to keep the deception going.
I would not trust any claims in this direction. Such things don’t tend to last very long or age very well, because the functionality was being removed for a reason, leading to increasingly large portions of the code base diverging, an ever-increasing maintenance burden, and missing out on genuine improvements from upstream.
As an example of this sort of thing, consider when Firefox removed XUL extensions (Firefox 57, November 2017). This upset lots of people, and did kill many extensions that just couldn’t exist in the WebExtensions world, and hobble others. But it was done for a reason, and if you compare pre-Quantum and current Firefox you’ll find one of two is faster, more secure and more reliable: and it ain’t the old one. XUL extensions imposed a serious burden and prevented concrete technical improvements. Of course, other changes may have been made that you may or may not like so much (e.g. UI changes), but the removal of XUL/XPCOM has been a good thing for the browser in general.
A number of forks retained XUL extensions, but most died fairly quickly because of code base improvements predicated on their removal. There are still a couple around, I think most notably Pale Moon; they’re all now necessarily hard forks. I don’t know what Pale Moon’s more recent web tech feature support is like—I don’t imagine it’s very good, because it can’t take advantage of Firefox’s efforts. https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml paints a fairly bleak picture for the future: things have gone badly wrong already, and they admit that the project is in the long term basically untenable as a general web browser. (That entire article is also highly biased in its presentation of the entire thing, fairly heavily anti-Mozilla and anti-browser-vendors-in-general-though-they-frame-it-as-Google.)
Such forks also rapidly decay in usefulness in another way: no one makes XUL extensions any more, and probably no one will be making Manifest v2 extensions any more. For a while, the likes of Pale Moon may have allowed you to keep using more extensions, but by now, using Pale Moon means that you get fewer extensions than Firefox, and so they lose their appeal.
There are cases where forks succeed in becoming the primary version of the thing; for example, OpenOffice.org has over time essentially died, and its fork LibreOffice has succeeded. MySQL versus MariaDB is mildly similar, though MySQL’s failure is much less stark.
There are also cases where forks have succeeded, with divergence of both. There’s even a good one in the web browser world: when Google forked WebKit into Blink. In that case, both engines were improved by the fork, because WebKit had been supporting two different directions to a degree, and now they could pursue their own individual goals with better focus (both were able to remove lots of code), and both had enough investment to survive. Over time, their code bases have become more and more incompatible.
—⁂—
So… in a few years’ time, probably no reputable Chromium fork will support v2 extensions, and you probably won’t have any reason to want one that does anyway.
Firefox could absolutely mantain XUL and have improved it's engine, they just chose not, or were ordered by google to do so
And as you say several 1 dev forks were able to keep both WebExtensions and XUL for free, why wouldn't the million dollar company spending millions on side quests?
What Firefox did was a shoot in the foot, loose active users, and fragment the community for many years. And we can only hope the same happens to Chrome
No, the XUL/XPCOM design, by its nature, became harder and harder to maintain, and there are also plenty of very specific and highly desirable technical improvements that it made completely impracticable, and which have been made since then.
All that LegacyFox looks to do is allow loading old-style extension manifests, by converting them to new-style, just with the difference that they’re given unfettered access to internals. This allows you to load the extensions, but doesn’t guarantee that they will work.
I haven’t tried actually running any of this stuff, but I get the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog <https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG...>, and yeah, regular fixes have been required, with more and more things breaking. This is a pretty good demonstration of what the problem with XPCOM extensions was, as the article pointed out: they had too much access to browser internals, which made it hard for the browser to change things without breaking extensions, and necessary changes just kept on breaking extensions again and again and again, and extension developers were tired of it. In the WebExtension era, extensions almost never break, despite major concrete improvements in the browser having been made that in the past would have broken at least every interesting extension out there.
XUL (by which I mean XUL, not XPCOM) isn’t completely gone yet, because it was such a core part of the browser that it takes a long time to kill it completely, but most of what made it it is gone.
XPCOM extensions made Firefox unmaintainable. Although they were a great thing, they had to die for Firefox to survive.
* VimFX still works in the latest release of Firefox
* If random people on the internet can square it, so probably could the Firefox team, they didn't need to keep all features
* They decided to handicap their addons to match Chrome, because "security" and lost users
* Chrome is now doing the same
> ...but I the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog...
The changelog shows a fix this month for the firefox 127 this month, the current version is 126. And the readme clearly states firefox-esr 115+. You don't get more working than that
> WebExtension era, extensions almost never break
Any other recent extension needs way more maintenance to keep up with the constant evolving of the WebExtensions apis. And you can look at their logs. Years to partially catch up, and much more work for worse user experience
> ..they had too much access to browser internals..
All apps have to much access, that's is the same lame excuse Google is using now. All extensions are reviewed by Google/Mozilla and manually installed by the user. If they can't keep them safe hire someone who can. Especially Chrome that already has APIs for random websites to access USBs, filesystem, etc..
> no reputable Chromium fork will support v2 extensions, and you probably won’t have any reason to want one that does anyway.
I don't disagree with the first part here (I've heard numerous complaints about chromium forkers about how absolutely awful a chromium fork is to maintain and how the chrome team likes to deliberately break internal patterns), but I think you underestimate the importance of reputable adblockers to both tech people and downstream tech users.
Because when family calls about Chromes adblockers not working right, what the family techie is going to do is install Firefox, not Chrome or its forks.
I hope I underestimate it, but observation has taught me a good deal of cynicism.
Remember also that, in the short term, the regressions for content blockers from moving to v3 are comparatively minor. That tends to be a knell: there’s not enough to get outraged about straight away, probably only if you could compare the situation a few years later.
"This will be followed gradually in the coming months by the disabling of those extensions. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension."
Soon, more than 50 million users of uBlock Origin will have their extension deactivated and directed to "alternatives" chosen by Google. This will be the end of an era where users still had control.
gorhill, probably understandably, refuses to update uBlock Origin to comply with V3, as a result he will use the majority of the userbase. The name of his new extension, "uBlock Origin Lite", will also not help with adoption.
I wonder whether it would be a wise decision by gorhill to replace uBlock Origin with a V3-compliant version when V2 is phased out.
That is very likely the one reason, which means that although Google needs Mozilla to stay afloat for their "See, your honor, we're not a monopoly!" ridiculous argument, they still have a huge leverage to literally force Mozilla to keep Firefox behind.
I wonder if everyone calling Firefox as "Google Firefox" could somehow compromise that narrative.
> they still have a huge leverage to literally force Mozilla to keep Firefox behind.
I wonder if that was part of the reason Mozilla chose to lay off the entire R&D team that was working on their next-generation browser engine that would solve some pretty long-standing issues?
Anyway, building a browser is hard and expensive work, and it was probably a mistake to move away from getting one in a box at Best Buy for $50.
Derivatives of Firefox can take or leave features that Mozilla is pushing. For example Pocket isn't in LibreWolf. Google and Mozilla have less influence over what derivatives do - well that's my hope anyway. It's still not ideal. Can you recommend any alternatives that have good fingerprinting resistance and are not Chromium / Gecko / WebKit based?
> The name of his new extension, "uBlock Origin Lite", will also not help with adoption.
Honestly until actually looking at it earlier this year I assumed the Lite version was just a somewhat pared down version but people should really look at the screenshots[1]. It's painfully mocking of the change with an intentionally kids-drawing-like UI and seemingly zero configurable settings outside of three sliders.
I can understand his frustration. uBO will lose what makes it special, the ability to serve as a wide-spectrum content blocker. He wants to make a statement.
Well no, the problem is precisely that it can't work as well as the normal version. There may be merit to the claim that it's good enough for your uses, but that's a different claim. (Ex. last I'd heard it can't handle CNAME cloaking.)
It could be state that uBlock Lite works fine for what it actually does, but it “only works as well as the normal version” if you ignore the features that uBlock Origin has which it simply does not.
And those features make uBlock Origin much more effective. With Lite, filter lists can only update when the extension does (delaying new filters which stalky advertisers will use to their advantage as they can update faster than the extension), some filter types not supported, no element picker and other options for crafting your own filters, no external filter list support, …
They can say whatever they want on that site. To me Firefox feels much slower and it's not just placebo. I suspect it has to do with poor multithreading. I still get hangs or slow responsiveness of the entire Firefox chrome because of a single misbehaving tab. I can also see that some media sites (e.g. di.fm or SoundCloud) use more CPU when playing media.
It's almost certainly just placebo. I've been using firefox next to chrome for years and it's completely unnoticeable outside of a handful of Google-specific sites (YouTube, mostly)
Agreed. It's not just a placebo effect, it really is slower. People often don't notice this because they use relatively high-end machines. If you're skeptical, try running it on a low-end laptop or a Raspberry Pi. The difference is like night and day.
Have you used Firefox recently in 2024 ? I had switched permanently to Firefox in early 2023. But, even in late 2023, there were issues with "misbehaving tabs" are you put it. However, now in mid-2024, everything is butter smooth. A fair number of pending issues were fixed in Firefox over the last year. Including a 25 year old bug!
A lot of Firefox contributors rolled up their sleeves over the last year. Chrome is FULLY in the "Enterprise Spyware" space now with the glaring introduction of ad topics over and above community objections. The need for an alternative cross platform browser that is not corporate and ad-controlled has solidified.
I've used Firefox for at least five years. I switched to Vivaldi (which is Chromium-based) about two weeks ago and the speed difference feels liberating.
It was never so black and white. If we define control as the ability to configure the browser as one wants and its extensibility then I'd agree that Firefox did have far more control until the Quantum update where it was gutted, while some Chromium based browsers like Vivaldi are feature rich and have features Firefox doesn't (only now approaching a quasi-equivalence with the pre-Chromium Opera before it too was gutted).
I still no longer use Firefox as a main desktop browser due to the features I loved no longer being possible and never getting equivalents, despite using Firefox as a mobile browser and every other day on desktop for other purposes.
However due to the Manifest v2 phase out some of the more useful extensibility on the Chromium side is being removed (outside of say backporting like Brave but we'll see how long that will last), so one may have to consider alternatives if need be.
Well at least the techie crowd can still use /etc/hosts (or the equivs on Mac/Win) which, if frequently-enough (weekly, biweekly, even monthly is enough) updated with the https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts (or similar other projects if they exist), seems to "block" ads sufficiently well (no in-page DOM node removals of course, just network-unreachable image/script/iframe/popup URLs).
The first step is for Mozilla to finally stop shooting Firefox in the foot by dumbing it down into oblivion, adding unnecessary stuff nobody asked for or removing features people stayed on Firefox for, angering it's loyal userbase in the process and loosing market share. And then we can talk about what WE can do.
What I can do, is criticize them and hope they listen. I'm not gonna use a product I dislike just of charity, to boost their marketshare, while they're swimming in those sweet Google dollarydoos and ignoring their long term users.
There isn't anything we can do about that. We need to accept it's our best alternative despite being imperfect and figure out what we can do to popularize it.
Oh nice! Looks like vertical tabs are part of that too! That’s not a critical feature for me, but it sure is nice to have. Looking forward to this release!
Test your code against Firefox. I've encountered many bugs (mostly small and non-breaking issues) in major enterprise SPAs which happened because the developers only did their stuff in Chrome. Little things, like spans acting as check-boxes (why?) only being selectable via keyboard, or custom tool tips not aligning with elements come to mind. But also breaking issues, like using APIs that only just landed in Chrome or assuming the non-standard behavior of the Chrome behavior is the actual standard across all browsers.
every day new people come here with "i made a new browser extension" that invariably only has chrome support. demand they bring firefox up to speed or give preference to firefox addons.
Stop using Chrome yourself, and help your less-tech-savvy friends and family switch to Firefox. During Firefox installation, select the options to migrate everything from Chrome, then set Firefox as the system default browser and uninstall Chrome.
Yeah yeah. They'll see usage dropping thanks to their spyware, sorry strike that, telemetry. Then there will be a point where "too few people use this why so we keep it around" and it will get removed.
Why does "spyware" only matters for Firefox but not other browsers, considering ~97% of the browser market share is proprietary browsers.
If people cared about privacy majority of users wouldn't use Chrome.
Also what is the point of complaining about spyware when the only viable option is Chrome (and other Chromium based browsers), I trust Mozilla more than any proprietary browser vendor. They collect less data than any of the proprietary browsers. I can actually disable "spyware" using config options. They are not some black box switches that might disable the "spyware" unlike proprietary browsers.
Telemetry doesn't help make a browser better. If anything it makes it worse by diverting resources from the actual browser or any other project it gets shoved into. Furthermore it is used as an excuse to remove features.
And yes 97% of people are idiots who should never have been given a computer. They don't care that every bit of data is phoned home thereby making worse for the rest.
The #1 reason I run ad blockers is to defend against malware and such.
There have been several documented cases where compromised ad networks have served exploits causing major issues, like getting your bank accounts drained.
Thus a sufficiently good ad blocker is non-negotiable for me.
So far Firefox has been serving me very well as my primary browser both on desktop and mobile for a long time now.
For an instance, i've built a Linguist, is a full featured translation in browser that may translate even offline (with embedded Bergamot translator of Mozilla) https://github.com/translate-tools/linguist
One of important Linguist features is that user able to use custom translators, it means user may insert their javascript code that implements a translator class, and then use their custom translator. So it is possible to use ChatGPT as translation module in Linguist, or even local instance of LLAMA, any proprietary translation service API, etc.
But with manifest V3, google also ban RCE (remote code execution), so probably when i will implement a feature "custom translators store" where will be present a lot of custom translators from a github, and this feature will fetch their code when user press "install", a google will ban this version, and i will be forced to roll back this feature for chrome, and leave it as is in Firefox.
As result, a Chrome users will always have a "simplified" versions of features and we will have inversed case with Browser API features (when site tell you "go chrome to run my features"). An extensions will notify their users "go firefox to have all features like a custom translators store or ads blocker".
I'm very worried over the fact that Google is more and more becoming the de facto gatekeeper to the internet. There's still Firefox and Safari, but Firefox feels like it's dying, while Safari's user numbers will take a hit after the EU's decision to loosen iOS browser restrictions.
The internet almost feels as important than the real, physical world. Imagine being bombarded with ads in real life. A lot of the tech-savy people use adblockers to make the internet experience tolerable, but once Google figures out how to stop all ad blocking and no other browser exists, it's game over. I hope that situation will spark a flame in the tech community to do something about the ad-driven internet as it exists today.
That's setting a registry value and having Chrome settings pages telling you that "Your browser is managed" for another six months of V2 uBlock Origin.
I have a Manifest v2 extension in the Chrome Web Store, it works absolutely fine, and there is no reasonable reason to change it. But Google says they'll de-list it if I don't rewrite it for Manifest v3. I don't wish to donate my scarce free time to a multi-billion dollar corporation so they can make the world worse.
84 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadGoogle resumes transition to Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38292409) - Nov 2023 (131 comments)
Chrome users beware: Manifest v3 is deceitful and threatening (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29502439) - Dec 2021 (375 comments)
Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 Is Deceitful and Threatening (2021) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301801) - Nov 2023 (202 comments)
That more or less makes it a good standard chromium browser.
Might have changed now though
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...
Brave's close association with cryptocurrency and Web 3 is also concerning. Most fraud occurs at the endpoints, not in the middle. While the centralized banking system has mechanisms like chargebacks to address fraud, the crypto space lacks such safeguards. Cryptocurrency has limited real-life utility and is largely sustained by con artists looking to scam people. Once people recognize one scheme as a scam, new crypto concepts, like NFT games, are quickly invented to keep the deception going.
As an example of this sort of thing, consider when Firefox removed XUL extensions (Firefox 57, November 2017). This upset lots of people, and did kill many extensions that just couldn’t exist in the WebExtensions world, and hobble others. But it was done for a reason, and if you compare pre-Quantum and current Firefox you’ll find one of two is faster, more secure and more reliable: and it ain’t the old one. XUL extensions imposed a serious burden and prevented concrete technical improvements. Of course, other changes may have been made that you may or may not like so much (e.g. UI changes), but the removal of XUL/XPCOM has been a good thing for the browser in general.
A number of forks retained XUL extensions, but most died fairly quickly because of code base improvements predicated on their removal. There are still a couple around, I think most notably Pale Moon; they’re all now necessarily hard forks. I don’t know what Pale Moon’s more recent web tech feature support is like—I don’t imagine it’s very good, because it can’t take advantage of Firefox’s efforts. https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml paints a fairly bleak picture for the future: things have gone badly wrong already, and they admit that the project is in the long term basically untenable as a general web browser. (That entire article is also highly biased in its presentation of the entire thing, fairly heavily anti-Mozilla and anti-browser-vendors-in-general-though-they-frame-it-as-Google.)
Such forks also rapidly decay in usefulness in another way: no one makes XUL extensions any more, and probably no one will be making Manifest v2 extensions any more. For a while, the likes of Pale Moon may have allowed you to keep using more extensions, but by now, using Pale Moon means that you get fewer extensions than Firefox, and so they lose their appeal.
There are cases where forks succeed in becoming the primary version of the thing; for example, OpenOffice.org has over time essentially died, and its fork LibreOffice has succeeded. MySQL versus MariaDB is mildly similar, though MySQL’s failure is much less stark.
There are also cases where forks have succeeded, with divergence of both. There’s even a good one in the web browser world: when Google forked WebKit into Blink. In that case, both engines were improved by the fork, because WebKit had been supporting two different directions to a degree, and now they could pursue their own individual goals with better focus (both were able to remove lots of code), and both had enough investment to survive. Over time, their code bases have become more and more incompatible.
—⁂—
So… in a few years’ time, probably no reputable Chromium fork will support v2 extensions, and you probably won’t have any reason to want one that does anyway.
And as you say several 1 dev forks were able to keep both WebExtensions and XUL for free, why wouldn't the million dollar company spending millions on side quests?
What Firefox did was a shoot in the foot, loose active users, and fragment the community for many years. And we can only hope the same happens to Chrome
https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... is one article about this, and other information floats about the place too.
XUL is a core part of Firefox, and can still be re-enabled for addons today
https://gir.st/blog/legacyfox.htm https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx
But I guess only randos on the internet have the technical know-how
I don’t see any comments on that article?
—⁂—
You’re missing the picture.
All that LegacyFox looks to do is allow loading old-style extension manifests, by converting them to new-style, just with the difference that they’re given unfettered access to internals. This allows you to load the extensions, but doesn’t guarantee that they will work.
By the end of 2019, XUL Templates, XUL Overlays, XBL Stylesheets, XUL Documents, and XBL had been removed <https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/24SH5R0AcC0/m/B6Sc...>.
Last year, XUL Layout was finally removed <https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html>.
I haven’t tried actually running any of this stuff, but I get the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog <https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG...>, and yeah, regular fixes have been required, with more and more things breaking. This is a pretty good demonstration of what the problem with XPCOM extensions was, as the article pointed out: they had too much access to browser internals, which made it hard for the browser to change things without breaking extensions, and necessary changes just kept on breaking extensions again and again and again, and extension developers were tired of it. In the WebExtension era, extensions almost never break, despite major concrete improvements in the browser having been made that in the past would have broken at least every interesting extension out there.
XUL (by which I mean XUL, not XPCOM) isn’t completely gone yet, because it was such a core part of the browser that it takes a long time to kill it completely, but most of what made it it is gone.
XPCOM extensions made Firefox unmaintainable. Although they were a great thing, they had to die for Firefox to survive.
* VimFX still works in the latest release of Firefox
* If random people on the internet can square it, so probably could the Firefox team, they didn't need to keep all features
* They decided to handicap their addons to match Chrome, because "security" and lost users
* Chrome is now doing the same
> ...but I the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog...
The changelog shows a fix this month for the firefox 127 this month, the current version is 126. And the readme clearly states firefox-esr 115+. You don't get more working than that
> WebExtension era, extensions almost never break
Any other recent extension needs way more maintenance to keep up with the constant evolving of the WebExtensions apis. And you can look at their logs. Years to partially catch up, and much more work for worse user experience
https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/philc/vimium
> ..they had too much access to browser internals..
All apps have to much access, that's is the same lame excuse Google is using now. All extensions are reviewed by Google/Mozilla and manually installed by the user. If they can't keep them safe hire someone who can. Especially Chrome that already has APIs for random websites to access USBs, filesystem, etc..
And a lot less relevant.
It's easy to achieve technical excellence: a typical "hello, world" runs fast, is very secure and reliable.
I don't disagree with the first part here (I've heard numerous complaints about chromium forkers about how absolutely awful a chromium fork is to maintain and how the chrome team likes to deliberately break internal patterns), but I think you underestimate the importance of reputable adblockers to both tech people and downstream tech users.
Because when family calls about Chromes adblockers not working right, what the family techie is going to do is install Firefox, not Chrome or its forks.
Remember also that, in the short term, the regressions for content blockers from moving to v3 are comparatively minor. That tends to be a knell: there’s not enough to get outraged about straight away, probably only if you could compare the situation a few years later.
Soon, more than 50 million users of uBlock Origin will have their extension deactivated and directed to "alternatives" chosen by Google. This will be the end of an era where users still had control.
gorhill, probably understandably, refuses to update uBlock Origin to comply with V3, as a result he will use the majority of the userbase. The name of his new extension, "uBlock Origin Lite", will also not help with adoption.
I wonder whether it would be a wise decision by gorhill to replace uBlock Origin with a V3-compliant version when V2 is phased out.
In 2022, 81% of Mozilla's revenues were derived from Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
Use LibreWolf instead.
I wonder if everyone calling Firefox as "Google Firefox" could somehow compromise that narrative.
I wonder if that was part of the reason Mozilla chose to lay off the entire R&D team that was working on their next-generation browser engine that would solve some pretty long-standing issues?
Anyway, building a browser is hard and expensive work, and it was probably a mistake to move away from getting one in a box at Best Buy for $50.
What's the point when it's literally just a reskinned firefox? What's keeping Firefox alive is also keeping all of its derivatives alive.
Honestly until actually looking at it earlier this year I assumed the Lite version was just a somewhat pared down version but people should really look at the screenshots[1]. It's painfully mocking of the change with an intentionally kids-drawing-like UI and seemingly zero configurable settings outside of three sliders.
Edit: typos
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home
Adguard is working on an actual replacement of their Ad-Blocker that comes as close as possible to the V2-version:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker-m...
I can understand his frustration. uBO will lose what makes it special, the ability to serve as a wide-spectrum content blocker. He wants to make a statement.
And those features make uBlock Origin much more effective. With Lite, filter lists can only update when the extension does (delaying new filters which stalky advertisers will use to their advantage as they can update faster than the extension), some filter types not supported, no element picker and other options for crafting your own filters, no external filter list support, …
Google land never had it. The land with choices is called Firefox, and yet people still believe that it's a slow, bloated, supports-nothing browser.
Google does the advertisement part well, it seems.
For facts: see https://arewefastyet.com
This is not on a cutting edge PC. It's a core i7-7700.
Firefox's soft spot is DNS response speed. If your DNS is slow, Firefox is slow. Otherwise it's indifferent from Google Chrome speed-wise.
Doesn't happen with Firefox.
A lot of Firefox contributors rolled up their sleeves over the last year. Chrome is FULLY in the "Enterprise Spyware" space now with the glaring introduction of ad topics over and above community objections. The need for an alternative cross platform browser that is not corporate and ad-controlled has solidified.
I still no longer use Firefox as a main desktop browser due to the features I loved no longer being possible and never getting equivalents, despite using Firefox as a mobile browser and every other day on desktop for other purposes.
However due to the Manifest v2 phase out some of the more useful extensibility on the Chromium side is being removed (outside of say backporting like Brave but we'll see how long that will last), so one may have to consider alternatives if need be.
This will be the beginning of an era where Chrome is no longer the browser used by the overwhelming majority.
This guy has two incredible gifts: writing amazingly awesome adblockers, and picking increasingly-awful names for them.
I salute you, sir!
Why does Google mention only ad related addons in their blog post?
Another comment here posted some previous headlines like "Manifest V3 Is Deceitful and Threatening" which give a clue to the direction I guess.
What are Google's intenions with Manifest v3?
Because the main goal of the transition to V3 is to effectively kill adblockers.
What I can do, is criticize them and hope they listen. I'm not gonna use a product I dislike just of charity, to boost their marketshare, while they're swimming in those sweet Google dollarydoos and ignoring their long term users.
I'm a user, and as a user I use the best tool for me because it's a tool, not a religion I must preach to others.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
https://search.brave.com/search?q=tab+groups+for+firefox&sum...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/heres-what-were-working-...
The fastest way to adoption would be to listen to the users and make the best web dev tools.
FF drives me mad, tabs bookmarks, containers, profiles, extension security and transparency. Wtf does Mozilla spend its money on?
this is my 2 cents
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi...
If people cared about privacy majority of users wouldn't use Chrome.
Also what is the point of complaining about spyware when the only viable option is Chrome (and other Chromium based browsers), I trust Mozilla more than any proprietary browser vendor. They collect less data than any of the proprietary browsers. I can actually disable "spyware" using config options. They are not some black box switches that might disable the "spyware" unlike proprietary browsers.
And yes 97% of people are idiots who should never have been given a computer. They don't care that every bit of data is phoned home thereby making worse for the rest.
There have been several documented cases where compromised ad networks have served exploits causing major issues, like getting your bank accounts drained.
Thus a sufficiently good ad blocker is non-negotiable for me.
So far Firefox has been serving me very well as my primary browser both on desktop and mobile for a long time now.
Random websites: "they need access to your filesystem, USBs, GPU, Bluetooth..."
Extensions installed by the user, and reviewed by google to be in the store: "those are too dangerous, need to be limited"
Personally I am rooting for the retun of host wide Ad blockers like Proxomitron, privoxy, with https support
The danger is to their ad revenue, not the user.
Giving more of your PC to websites means you’ll likely use the web more and consume more ads.
For an instance, i've built a Linguist, is a full featured translation in browser that may translate even offline (with embedded Bergamot translator of Mozilla) https://github.com/translate-tools/linguist
One of important Linguist features is that user able to use custom translators, it means user may insert their javascript code that implements a translator class, and then use their custom translator. So it is possible to use ChatGPT as translation module in Linguist, or even local instance of LLAMA, any proprietary translation service API, etc.
But with manifest V3, google also ban RCE (remote code execution), so probably when i will implement a feature "custom translators store" where will be present a lot of custom translators from a github, and this feature will fetch their code when user press "install", a google will ban this version, and i will be forced to roll back this feature for chrome, and leave it as is in Firefox.
As result, a Chrome users will always have a "simplified" versions of features and we will have inversed case with Browser API features (when site tell you "go chrome to run my features"). An extensions will notify their users "go firefox to have all features like a custom translators store or ads blocker".
Is this a distributed and balkanized web3?
In a sense one could claim that the hash is a "compressed" version of the code.
I am not saying that it is a good solution or anything, just wondering about how "Remote" is defined.
Of course I will fight to keep features in both browsers, but chrome really fight for money and against a good UX
The internet almost feels as important than the real, physical world. Imagine being bombarded with ads in real life. A lot of the tech-savy people use adblockers to make the internet experience tolerable, but once Google figures out how to stop all ad blocking and no other browser exists, it's game over. I hope that situation will spark a flame in the tech community to do something about the ad-driven internet as it exists today.
https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#ExtensionManifestV...
That's setting a registry value and having Chrome settings pages telling you that "Your browser is managed" for another six months of V2 uBlock Origin.