I suspect it'll actually work much longer and just become more obnoxious to enable in a year. A complicated workaround that placates power users so they stay on Chrome but that most users won't bother with is perfect.
If Google leaves a boolean switch in Chromium to keep V2 enabled then I assume most if not all of the third party Chromium-derived browsers will just flip it to true by default. That's easy for them to do, the hard part is if Google strips out V2 altogether and leaves the downstream browsers to patch it back in.
Even when it's stripped out entirely, it will be easy to add back in. The changes (that adblockers care about) are just a few if statements changing the conditions under which synchronous inspection of web requests are allowed. Manifest V3 still allows them. But only in limited circumstances which are unsuitable for ad blocking.
I consider my non-technical friends/family technically dead. They're lost souls you can't help, like Elizabeth Swan looking down at her father's ghost on the boat. We can't help.
Freedom and privacy are luxuries only available to those nerdy enough to use Linux. The rest are prey/prisoners/peasants to the technofeudal overlords.
After the XUL removal debacle a number of years ago, I can't trust Firefox to offer a suitably flexible and capable extension system over the long run.
While some people will claim that those changes were necessary, the impact was still very negative for the extension developers and users who were affected at the time.
The numerous other user-hostile decisions made by Firefox's developers certainly don't help repair the trust that was lost then.
Were the poor decisions made by Mozilla engineers or by Mozilla Corporate Executives? Mozilla has never paid engineers particularly well; in the past engineers joined mostly out of a duty bound to philosophical alignment.
What has been holding you back so far? It seems strange to me that so many normally quite pro-privacy, pro-FOSS, Google-sceptical people are still using Chrome to this point.
I would like to have privacy but understand that’s nearly impossible in reality. I was using Chrome mostly due to inertia, but not being able to block ads is unacceptable to me. I do most of my browsing on iOS Safari these days, but use Chrome on my work computer.
I’m unfortunately handcuffed to google due to gmail, switching seems like a monumental task and google is going to get my personal data whether I have gmail or not from AdWords, etc.
And it's even more difficult because I can't find a link to the original store page from an addon within firefox so I can't easily share my findings. https://i.imgur.com/zh2M9YA.png I do not see a link. Perhaps fixing that should have been a priority for Mozilla instead of a bullshit alt generator but it's AI so of course it's got priority. Instead of doing everything in their power to grow their market share ... spreadfirefox reboot when.
First recommendation would be a pihole running anywhere you can run it, but if you don't want to or can't do that, you can use Steven Black's ad list to create a hosts file to DNS sink ad/bad networks locally:
Isn't DNS-level blocking strictly less capable than even the nerfed Manifest V3 filtering API? V3 can still block at a more granular level than nuking entire hostnames AFAIK, even if it's not as granular as V2.
Yes, I didn't intend to suggest it a replacement for a strong ad block but if v3 neuters it for those who don't want to or can't swap browsers.
Also a big benefit of DNS level blocking is it can block telemetry other unwanted network traffic (unless connection by IP or some other wizardry), for instance how often my TV attempts to phone home.
Nope, it will be removed after 1 year. There is a chance they delay it depending on how much the enterprises complain, but so long as all their big clients are migrated I doubt they care about the long-tail.
There's a good chance that whoever is driving this change within Google gets promoted/retires in less than a year, and then it gets left in limbo forever like so many other TODO():'s in the code...
Question: Is it possible to run ad blocking at the OS level rather than in the browser? Requests to ad servers just never leave your PC? traffic from ad servers just never arrives at the browser?
A common approach is to mess around with name resolution. Many operating systems have a hosts file that can be modified. You can do DNS on your own computer. Piholes are a variation on this where people usually use a separate machine to handle DNS requests for their entire network. If you cannot change the DNS for your computer/device, some people use a VPN. I believe this is how things are currently handled on Android.
This approach is less flexible than the filtering you can get from a web browser. On the other hand, it can be used to filter DNS requests from all software. With something like a Pihole, you can configure the Pihole and (maybe) your router, and it will work for all devices on your network.
On Android there is AdGuard which runs a VPN locally to block ads. It can also parse SSL traffic if one installs an SSL certificate but I don't like the idea very much. In the end I just use it as a light adblock for unencrypted traffic when I don't use Firefox.
Serious question, why is anyone still using Chrome? It's so user-hostile and basically spyware at this point, it boggles my mind that anyone would intentionally install spyware on their computer.
2) Report those sites to https://webcompat.com/, and/or to Mozilla (who have an evangelism team to reach out to those sites and get them to stop doing that).
I just keep a Chrome install around and when a website seems like it's misbehaving I just fire it up in Chrome.
It's a bunch of baggage to have around, but it's useful for other stuff. Like when you hit your monthly limit of free articles you can just fire it up in Chrome and now you've doubled your monthly free limit!
Sometimes this might not work, in that case try a different extension or different user agent strings. I had to go through a few before I found one that worked.
How many people are gonna do all this to get an adblocker working? How long is this workaround gonna be allowed by google?
What excuses remain for sustaining the chromium monopoly that allows this shitshow, and for using chrome and chromium derived browsers instead of firefox?
I don’t know whether FF lacks these features, but I’m using:
- webpage splits
- search by image
- go to non-<a> url in bg tab
- open in new tab in a virtual sub group rather than just to the right or at the end
- tabs retain width on close until mouse goes away (helps with closing series of tabs)
- bookmarks open in new tab by default
- last tab doesn’t close the browser
- gestures and toolbar customization
That’s in Vivaldi, I probably forgot a bunch of features that feel natural but may have no FF counterpart. Tbh, looking at FF settings, there’s basically none. You can’t miss features that you never had, I guess.
If you have those one or two very specific websites that just cannot cope with Firefox, just use Chrome for them. They're likely not the ad-filled pages anyway, but rather some specific companies.
We've done this for the IE in the past, we can do it today. It really doesn't take that much time.
There's only one thing that will fix this situation long term and it's lowering chrome's market share. Don't stick with it and get continuously abused - no, it won't get better, only worse from now on.
Most of those "cannot copes" can be fixed by changing the user agent to that of Chrome. Most sites that refuse to work in other browsers simply don't test on anything but Chrome and don't want the support burden.
> Most sites that refuse to work in other browsers simply don't test on anything but Chrome
Today yes, but that could start to change if most tech people stop using Chrome, which they will if they can't block ads easily. Plus many average semi-tech-savvy people use ad blockers and will kick up a fuss and switch if their browsing becomes suddenly ad-ridden. If Chrome gets a reputation like AOL or something, then it won't be as acceptable for a website to only support Chrome.
I don’t see how that is true. There are a ton of chromium based browsers, many with privacy enhancements baked in, and Safari is well supported (iOS monopoly ensures that).
I’ll give you Firefox not working well due to Mozilla shitting the bed under Baker who I consider a vandal and a charlatan.
As somebody who lives through IE6 the trend of a dominant browser shitting on users is the same - but so many more options to switch now.
I've been using Firefox exclusively for years. I have no idea what these people who say it breaks sites are talking about. If you absolutely need to use chrome for something just keep chromium around for that specific site.
Firefox is a decent browser. Some sites are coded like shit and then they futz around until it works in whatever Chrome your cousin used for development.
There's some very specific sites that are broken in non-chrome browsers. Writing this message took you more time than you'd spend starting chrome specifically for them for the next few months.
I see you managed to avoid encountering the Great ActiveX Catastrophe. Microsoft successfully managed to lock thousands of services behind proprietary extensions that only IE supported.
Also, IE wasn't technically garbage. There were a few, specific things wrong with it. Its main issue was that it implemented web features idiosyncratically, and Microsoft didn't document it, so you had to learn all of IE's "quirks" through trial and error: but apart from being undocumented, few of IE's idiosyncrasies were actually bugs. Its box model, for example, was arguably superior to the official W3C recommendation.
Removing ad blocking is what breaks the internet for me. Firefox is working 99.9% fine except 0.1% of site which I usually do not miss or in the worst case open in another browser. This is an insignificant nuance compared to the constant distraction of not using an ad blocker.
Source: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...