Clearly, Google is serious about trying to oust ad blockers from its browser, or at least those extensions with fuller (V2) levels of functionality. One of the crucial twists with V3 is that it prevents the use of remotely hosted code – as a security measure – but this also means ad blockers can’t update their filter lists without going through Google’s review process. What does that mean? Way slower updates for said filters, which hampers the ability of the ad-blocking extension to keep up with the necessary changes to stay effective.

(This isn’t just about browsers, either, as the war on advert dodgers extends to YouTube, too, as we’ve seen in recent months).

At any rate, Google is playing with fire here somewhat – or Firefox, perhaps we should say – as this may be the shove some folks need to get them considering another of the best web browsers out there aside from Chrome. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has vowed to maintain support for V2 extensions, while introducing support for V3 alongside to give folks a choice (now there’s a radical idea).

  • Mwa@lemm.ee
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    2 hours ago

    One of the reasons why I left chomium based browsers even ungoogled chromium (I use chromium alongside firefox but mainly firefox)

  • portside@monyet.cc
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    5 hours ago

    I’ve fully switched to Firefox everywhere. The only thing I’m missing is a lightweight browser which is not based on chromium for my potato tablet. jQuarks viewer is a good one but can be dumb sometimes, it opens image instead of the link for eg.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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      1 hour ago

      IIRC, they’ve said they’ll implement V3 to maintain compatibility, but they’ll also continue to maintain V2. You, the extension developer, will not be forced to use V3 if you don’t want to.

    • AWildMimicAppears@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 hours ago

      educated guess: since firefox is implementing v3 support alongside their v2 extensions, there shouldn’t be any issues running v2 and v3 extensions side by side in the foreseeable future

      • Excigma@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        I think they are wondering if one extension can use both v2 and v3 APIs at once? As in whether v3 APIs will be “backported” to allow v2 extensions to use them

    • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.club
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      4 hours ago

      The problem here is not just Chrome (as in Google Chrome) but Chromium, the web engine behind many browsers out there (such as Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, among many many others). For now there are two main web engines available, those being Chromium and Gecko (Firefox, Palemoon and many other Firefox forks). The deprecation of Manifest v2 is a Chromium change that includes (and focuses on) Chrome.

    • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      It’s not about intelligence it’s about what keeps you up at night. Most people aren’t bothered by cookies and ads, somehow.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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        34 minutes ago

        Most people are stupid, myopic imbeciles that arent bothered by anything until it personally affects them.

        Then they’ll howl like wolves at the moon about the great injustice of it all, and how could anyone allow this to happen.

        • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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          55 minutes ago

          And the creepiness. Advertisers can deduce many habits based on the information you give them. Some techniques can tell when people are pregnant before they do based on their pathing inside the store, for instance.

    • thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      For those of us who work in (or love) tech - we (myself included) grossly overestimate how much the general public cares about, or cares to be informed about, this stuff. Heck, even people in tech who know better.

      I wish it wasn’t the case but look how long and hard Microsoft moved on Internet Explorer and ActiveX back in the early days of the web.

      Google and Chrome is just another bit of history repeating.

      As an aside, I’ve been using Zen for about a week and it’s been wonderful. Easy transition from Firefox because it largely is Firefox, so anll my containers, extensions, annd settings carried over. Zen’s workspaces provide exactly the promise I’d hoped “tab groups” brought with Safari (but never worked right). I just wish there was an equivalent to the Hush plug-in on Safari (even after a year of full-timing FF, consent-o-matic is quite poor).

      • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        I know people who I thought brilliant until they said they were voting for trump. Way to shatter my opinion of you, jagoff.

    • Final Remix@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      I kinda have to at work. Our classroom computers reset between classes and Chrome is the only browser installed. I might ask IT about that, moving forward, given uBlock getting neutered soon.

  • quant@leminal.space
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    5 hours ago

    If only banks and government websites moved their asses and stopped mentioning Internet Explorer for one more time…

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    9 hours ago

    When is this happening? I’ve been telling my wife and kid that they need to stop using chrome for a year, but ublock is still working for them and blocking YouTube ads. They are the type that won’t switch until it becomes a problem for them.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      8 hours ago

      I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.

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    11 hours ago

    I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.

    • spector@lemmy.ca
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      2 hours ago

      It wasn’t hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What’s equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.

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      9 hours ago

      You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

    • Tilgare@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      I was pretty sure manifest v3 had already happened - but when I knew it was coming, I went ahead and switched ahead of time. Came with the extra bonus that now I’m ad free on mobile too! Mobile websites are absolutely filthy with popovers and 2 sentence paragraphs with an ad between every paragraph. I’m sick of it. And unfortunately I spend so much more time browsing the web from my phone these days than my desktop - so when I swapped on pc to Firefox, it was such a relief to have browser extensions on my phone now too.

    • sudo@lemmy.today
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      7 hours ago

      The cool kids are switching to Librewolf because whatever is happening at Mozilla is increasingly concerning by the day.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    I downloaded Librewolf today - the privacy oriented fork of Firefox!

    Good to see there are browser variants that aren’t just Chrome.

    • Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      I’ve been using librewolf for a several months. Be careful because streaming doesn’t always work on it due to DRM features, and YouTube has been spotty AF. With YouTube it might start the video a couple seconds into it, buffer for no discernable reason, or just skip a few random seconds.

      • Fashim@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        I use firefox but I have to change my useragent string to chrome with an extension to get YouTube working.

        Might be worth having a look to see if it fixes your issues

    • Album@lemmy.ca
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      12 hours ago

      yep firefox with arkenfox for me, same deal as librewolf. And Mull on mobile.

      Switched about 2-3 months ago thinking it might be difficult or impact me negatively or something but its been easy and great.

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        You know the problem I have with Librewolf? – Fuckall nobody knows how to spell it.

        The beauty of Firefox is that even the densest idiot knows how to spell those two words. And with attention spans the equivalent of a gnat, people need to have things simplified for them as much as humanly possible.

        Fortunately enough, Firefox is about the only one with a renderer that isn’t controlled by Google, but - even now they’re shifting to a pro-advertising stance and backing off of the privacy orientation that they took just a year or two ago.

        • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          Yes, and we will drop Mozilla when it drops uBlock as well. We will all get behind whatever open-source browser stops ads, and it will very quickly become the most widely used browser. Why? Because everybody despises fucking ads and you can’t curb-stomp them into liking ads, that’s why.

          Google can spend all the money it likes trying to piss on users and tell them it’s raining but at the end of the day, a new king will be crowned and if it isn’t Chrome and it isn’t Firefox, then it will be something else.

          And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it. Assertions to the contrary are FUD constantly being seeded by Google, Microsoft and their ilk to destroy competition. This is an existential necessity for Google, you can bet they are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.

    • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Until you actually need a chromium based browser. I get so annoyed when this happens.

      • LucidNightmare@lemm.ee
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        9 hours ago

        Almost 20 years and I’ve never needed a Chromium browser for anything. I’m sorry you were forced to use such garbage ass software.

        • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          I have chromium installed for the sole reason to cast some streams to my remote TVs. Otherwise it stays closed. I tried some work around with FF, but I couldn’t get it to work. It’s only once or twice a week for live sporting events, so I can stomach it.

          • LucidNightmare@lemm.ee
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            8 hours ago

            I understand where you’re coming from. It’s never happened to me, but if a website didn’t work with Firefox, I would just assume it’s a shit site ran by rookies who know nothing, and move on to a different site. I understand most people don’t have that kind of principle though.

            • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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              8 hours ago

              It’s not that the site doesn’t work in FF, it’s that casting the stream from that site to a remote TV in the house is only possible in chromium, at least with my current device setup. If I just watch on my computer, I watch in FF.

              • LucidNightmare@lemm.ee
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                8 hours ago

                Ah, you did say that. I’m sorry for my misunderstanding. I’ve never tried that, and you’re the first I’ve seen to mention it. I concede to your argument.

                • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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                  6 hours ago

                  I’m in the slow process of replacing devices with HTPCs then I won’t need to cast anything. Unfortunately computers and time don’t grow on trees.

      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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        11 hours ago

        In what situation do you need one?

        I’ve been using Firefox for over a decade and have literally never once needed to open a different web browser. For anything, ever. This is a very common complaint that tons of people seem to have that I have never seen happen even once out in the wild.

        • Evkob@lemmy.ca
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          3 hours ago

          I use Librewolf on desktop and Mull on mobile. I have a few extensions on both, which could definitely contribute to issues. When I have issues (usually government sites or financial stuff, sometimes DRM-related stuff for media) it’s easier to just use a Chromium-based browser with no extensions than try to troubleshoot specifically what’s causing the issues. I keep Falkon (desktop) and Vanadium (mobile) installed for this purpose.

          I get the feeling a lot of issues people are having in Firefox might be due to extensions or settings, which gets “fixed” by using another browser (which happens to be Chromium-based because most browsers are) and they blame the issue on Firefox itself.

        • Zetta@mander.xyz
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          9 hours ago

          I also use Firefox on my work computer, I need to quickly authorize a login in the browser before the local “app” opens (“app” because it’s just a webpage pretending to be an app) and I just recently got a notification that slack won’t support Firefox anymore so please switch to chrome. The fucking animals.

        • suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml
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          10 hours ago

          Several government websites for the state of Pennsylvania complain and refuse to work if they detect that you aren’t using chrome/edge/safari.

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            10 hours ago

            You can spoof your useragent to appear as chrome. And you should as it makes your browser less “unique”

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              7 hours ago

              While you can do this, it’s not clear to me that you should. There are a number of additional laws having to do with perjury and misusing goverment sites and while I would undoubtedly agree with you, were you to assert the application of those laws to the utilization of a user agent switcher is a ridiculous overreach, I am just as certain I have no desire to be in the hot-seat on the day we all find out.

              • bitwolf@lemmy.one
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                6 hours ago

                Oh wow I didn’t know that. I’ll have to double check for the states that are relevant for me.

                I imagine many people naively install a privacy extension and unknowingly have altered useragents

                • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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                  3 hours ago

                  Imagine the government coming after someone, demanding they give Google their fair share

          • poke@sh.itjust.works
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            10 hours ago

            Do the sites work if you use an extension that lies to them about what browser you are using?

        • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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          9 hours ago

          Firefox is getting so small it’s starting to disappear out of the testing matrix. Confluence has issues with it, you can’t always log into Vanguard on Firefox, many news website layouts have overlapping elements on Firefox, quite a few shopping websites too (H&M in Europe has a long-standing but with putting stuff in the shopping basket until they revamped their website a couple of months ago). Etc etc. I see it ALL the time.

      • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        As if installing and using something else means you can’t have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.

        • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          And I do. Sometimes I’ll just fire up Edge if Chrome isn’t installed since it’s chromium based.

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        11 hours ago

        If people used other browsers, then the market share would change and this would become less and less of a problem.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        There’s still Vivali which is Chromium based and still supporting V2 extension (like uBlock) until June 2025. Its not a full fix, but its a stay of execution. That said, I’m a FF primary user.

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          10 hours ago

          Vivaldi isn’t entirely open source, if that matters to you.

          Brave would be my recommendation, I just disable the crypto stuff.

          • Wiz@midwest.social
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            3 hours ago

            Brave’s CEO is so anti-gay, he dished out 4-figure checks to fight gayness.

            I’m not a fan of that, and Brave has issues with being Chromium-based, like Vivaldi.

            • funkajunk@lemm.ee
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              42 minutes ago

              I’m sorry, but that is an instance of separating the art from the artist, I really don’t care.

    • turtletracks@lemmy.zip
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      9 hours ago

      Right? I don’t think anyone using Chrome with adblockers is just gonna be like “oh well, guess we got ads now”