Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone

171 points by ipsum2 ↗ HN
The latest version of Chrome (138) removes Manifest v2 and all extensions that rely on it.

53 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 65.0 ms ] thread
uBlock Origin Lite is still there
Firefox is still there, but Mozilla is adding AI slop to it too. I’d love to see an extension to disable all that stuff, or ideally get rid of it and make it an extension
There's still a way to load it under Chrome 138, but when Chrome 139 lands, that's when MV2 will finally be removed.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

> Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule

I think uBO Lite works just fine for 99% of users.
Social Fixer is gone too. What to do?
so i use adguard in chrome now
You might as well use uBlock Origin Lite. The point is that all of these options are less powerful because of the limitations of manifest v3. Instead of downgrading the effectiveness, they’ve opted to release a separate less powerful option so that it’s clear to the end user that it’s less effective than what was available with manifest v2.
Is edge also following suit?
Advertising company forcibly disables software that stops the spread of malware.

Why would they do that?

Firefox is still a great browser with probably the best devtools.
Can you expand on the "best devtools" comparing to Chrome's?
Moved to firefox and I am glad I did, I want to use a browser that respects my privacy choices
I wish Firefox would at least implement a basic adblocker on iOS.

Without it, browsing is unbearable. I wonder if they're not allowed to do so because of their contract with Google?

Among the neater features of the full-featured uBO is its ability to load userscripts from external sources.

While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.

I fucking love how they are not just deleting it from my addons, but FORCING ME TO DELETE. They just dropped pop up "uhm.... it's unsafe, so... WE RECOMEND TO DELETE IT", and then won't let me to turn it on again.
HN was so hyped when chrome came out. Pushing it hard. A few people were saying, um guys, chrome is made by a company that sells ads, this is not going to work out well.
Chrome launched in an era where IE didn't stop the gazillion pop ups and crashed pretty often losing dozens of windows, before tabbed browsing and with no restore. Firefox was a resource hog due to memory fragmentation.

Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.

Everyone was hyped when Chrome came out. This is hard to believe but the world was different 20 years ago
I remember Firefox crashing on me nearly daily around the time Chrome came out. I didn’t need anyone to push Chrome on me. Chrome was just simply technologically superior.

But of course today there is little reason to not use Firefox.

Ladybird ladybird
I’m excited to see what Ladybird becomes, but it’s not exactly ready to be a daily driver.
Has anyone made the switch to firefox? I’d be sad to lose my nice google profile integration to chrome and the password manager. And whenever I try Firefox it feels a little bit jankier and slower, but that might just be in my head
Switching from chrome password manager to bitwarden is as easy as clicking export and then import.
I gave Firefox a try for a month, but ran into enough issues that I ended up switching back to Chrome about a week ago. Here are some of the problems I encountered that I can recall at the moment and doesn't include the many issues I managed to fix:

Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.

Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.

The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.

Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.

Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.

I've used Firefox for a few months now and it's generally fine, but noticeably slow and janky compared to Chrome. Several websites just didn't work right and required Chrome. The dev tools seem unreliable, with the network tab often failing to capture requests correctly.

I miss Chrome but won't go back without UBlock.

Hoping Kagi's Orion browser gets better.

It's a little bit slower, but I've been using Firefox on all my personal machines for ten years and finally switched my work web dev machine when Firefox introduced tab groups recently.

It's fine. My issues with it are few and far between. It's a little worse on android but small price to pay for ublock and dark reader imo

And unfortunately not a single great alternative as the better chromium forks don't plan to support it either...
Strange, still enabled and working for me.

Chrome 138.0.7204.101 uBlock Origin 1.65.0

I tried to move to brave, but I'm really disappointed in it. It frequently crashes, and it's slow to create new tabs/windows. The only reason I stick to it is due to the browser having ad block built in
Seems everyone is releasing a browser nowadays. (Not literally, this is a figure of speech.)

Perhaps uBlock/uMatrix needs its own browser.

Mozilla is "all in" on surveillance advertising. From its press releases and strategic initiatives (for lack of a better term), it appears to believe online advertising is essential for the www to exist. Whereas, it has never stated that "ad blockers" are essential for the www to exist.

Try Waterfox (if not Firefox), and UBlock Origin Lite if staying on Chrome.