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.
Zen and Vivaldi for me is the combo.
Firefox+uBO works fine. Brave shields works fine.
Zen has been pretty great so far
Firefox and its derivatives (and Safari - sorry Apple users) are the only browsers not using Google’s Blink web engine these days - at least until Ladybird is released.
Despite the Mozilla Foundation’s many stupid decisions, Firefox (and Safari) is starting to look like the only thing stopping Google from completely controlling the internet.
Not true — Safari is still based on WebKit. And Safari is still the default browser on over two and a half billion mobile devices currently in use. And say what you might about Apple, but at least they aren’t in the business of selling ads, and thus don’t have any business interest in allowing you to block them effectively, unlike Google.
They don’t sell as many ads, but they do sell ads. It was only a few months ago they announced that ads would be coming to their maps app. There’s ads in news, the App Store, music, and settings on iOS. Maybe more than aren’t coming to mind immediately
Oops. My bad. I swear I read somewhere that Safari was switching to Blink, but that isn’t the case.
Ublock was already somewhat neutered on Chrome, and people didn’t seem to notice. They keep using it.
I’m just so cynical these days. It’s not like the Windows XP era, where people eventually get fed up with enshittification, and move.
Google won. Facebook won.
They have absolute control, basically.
In all sadness, folks on Lemi and other more technically inclined forums infight even more than leftists infight, and all they do is sabotage themselves.
Projects like Firefox are mountains above Chrome when it comes to privacy and not ceding web control over to Google. Yet any thread about anything Firefox is doing is just filled with FUD from people complaining about small individual changes or Firefox not being perfect enough, so on and so forth.
It’s self-sabotage. If you didn’t think Firefox is good enough, congratulations. Now you’ve got Chrome, and pretty soon you won’t have Firefox.
😒
Firefox exists.
At ~3.5% market share, depending on the statistics source. And declining, month-on-month:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q4
And people still use these trash dumpster of a browser?
You know, I seem to see this rhetoric a lot, and it seems to be getting upvoted more now, which isn’t a good sign for Lemmy, but are you really surprised by this? Is this really a question? Are you really that under a rock?
If it’s rhetorical, then what’s the point? Is this just a petulant way to try and dumpster something without going through the effort of actually picking out a real problem with it, of which there are countless?
Is this starting an interesting discussion? Is this voicing an interesting opinion? What is the point of this exact kind of comment?
Maybe I’m just too autistic and I’m going off the rails here, but these are starting to itch like a form of “internet forum hives”.
That’s been the better browser since 2008 though.
Lynx gang, assemble
What’s Lynx? A quick search gave me a lot of different things
It’s CLI based browser that, as i understand, only runs on linux. There are text based alternatives for windows, but not nearly as cool.
No java, no nothing. Just plain text and funny colours everywhere. I used to use it a lot for wikipedia, scholar google and news outlets.
Apart from surfing the web, it proved to be a useful tool for covering serious fuckups in my linux partition.
People keep mentioning Firefox but fail to realize that Google, as the sole sponsor of Mozilla Corporation (not to be confused with Mozilla Foundation), can just kindly ask for Firefox to follow suit and gimp itself, just like it did before with a move to webextensions. Gotta admit it, Google has won the web, what they say (eventually) goes.
Firefox is partially in this position because the community really does not support Firefox. Every decision Firefox makes or Mozilla makes in an attempt to try and claw back their financial freedom away from Google, the community dumpsters them on. Then, on posts like this, the community turns around and dumpsters Firefox for being so financially dependent on Google.
FireFox was and is an awesome project, but unfortunately, without the financial backing of a large for-profit business, they cannot keep up with Chrome. Even then, FireFox, with an engineering team a quarter the size of Chrome’s, still manages to keep up, which is a god damn miracle.
Developing a browser that is fast, actually works with new web standards, stays up to date, and is adding features is incredibly difficult. It is a stupidly expensive endeavor, similar to the level of effort necessary for operating systems.
And unfortunately, there is no Linux equivalent for web browsers, at least not right now. There are some up-and-coming projects, but it’s going to be decades before they reach the level of maturity necessary to start competing against Chrome. At which point there may be so much standards capture that some of these browsers may find it impossible to actually catch up.
Google doesn’t even need to get their hands dirty like that. IMO all they need to do is continue making it difficult for companies to support Firefox when designing their websites. That, in addition to making sure companies know that Google is tirelessly working to make sure Chrome won’t work with ad blockers is going to eventually kill Firefox completely.
Glass half full time:
Making adblockers available to only people on the far fringe that are going to go through the extraordinary hoops to get it to work makes it less important to them to stymie the act of adblocking, because far fewer people are doing it. Businesses half-ass everything and do the lowest cost thing like always, so they will not bother to ever commit the token effort to stop the few remaining adblockers, making it trivially easy to perform the adblocking by comparison to today. The pendulum always swings, in everything, and one of the big factors that cause it to swing back even when all seems lost is that the current group or way of thinking that is at the forefront today has its group members get lazy and complacent in their superior position, creating opportunities for the opposition.
If there are no remaining mainstream browsers that support ad blockers that pendulum is going to take a long time to swing back.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Now they’re basically making us work on it. Sometimes loud obvious actions like this are the catalyst to more drastic response. Everything often seems to always stay the same, but everything stays the same up until the very second it doesn’t. Nobody knows when that will be, but it will be.
then we’ll move again, like we did with chrome. this game of cat and mouse is easy to keep up and really only serves to harm these companys in the long run.
Move to what and where? Browsers are basically OS’s at this point, even MS stopped developing its own. Ladybird is going to be a joke and don’t think any other company or community is coming to write a new one.
Except they aren’t moving anymore.
I think Google finally trapped most of the web’s population, for good.
That’s they’re choice is all I’ll say, I know plenty went to fire for for these reasons, it stands to reason they’ll do it again.
Like how they killed JPEG-XL.
All over some employee’s ego associated with his AVIF contributions, from what I’ve seen.
Google realized how much money they were losing by supporting adblock in the first place. They also had way too many extensions with MV2 that requested full site access…
At the end of the day, they want to force feed everyone advertisements. Often meant to make people angry or buy shit they don’t need.
It’s also why apps like NewPipe are in an arms race with the recent sideloading app changes for Android.
Inspired by the Ludovico Technique
The browser wars have been kind of strange from the perspective of someone who’s been using Firefox for well over a decade. It’s a bit like hearing about the Civil War while living in Oregon.
i used opera for around 13 years. i knew about the flaws but i was simply used to it, and as long as adblock worked i couldn’t be bothered to switch to anything else
then my laptop broke and only that happening gave me the incentive to install something else, i was starting from (close to) scratch anyway
it’ll take a lot of effort for people to abandon what they know, even if they’ll be moving towards something better
i use Zen now :) it’s nice
Zen is a reskinned Firefox. Firefox depends on Google’s funding to stay afloat.
Everything else, other than Safari on Mac is either chrome-based or firefox-based.
There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.
Man up and take your spyware like an obedient peasant
What’s to stop the developers of a Chromium fork like Cromite from mainting MV2 compatibility themselves?
Cromite’s only flaw (IMO) is that it based it’s built in adblocker on AdBlock instead of Ublock.
I’ve tried moving to Firefox and I don’t know, it just feels ugh to me. (scientific critique, I know…). It’s just something I can’t put my finger on; Firefox just doesn’t feel performative. whether that’s a frame-buffer animation thing, or icon shadows, or something else entirely, it just feels off to me in some uncally valley sort of way.
Work, once Google completely removes it are they really going to keep backporting it to current releases? I do not see that happening. And for ones doing it now as far as I know Google hasn’t removed the code yet.
Visibility.
See: Helium Browser. Which is already doing this, and shipping full UBO, yet most aren’t aware of it.
Also see: this comment is minimized by default, and most of Lemmy will never know the answer to OP’s question already exists. There are probably other forks that do this, too.
What’s to stop the developers of a Chromium fork like Cromite from mainting MV2 compatibility themselves?
It’s a lot of work, mostly. And how many of those V2 extensions are going to continue to provide patches anyway.
it just feels off to me in some uncally valley sort of way.
Maybe it’s the subliminal messages Google has been injecting over the years to make you avoid Firefox/non-chromium browsers.
Maybe it’s the subliminal messages Google has been injecting over the years to make you avoid Firefox/non-chromium browsers.
Well that would certainly explain my irrational fear of foxes.
I hear exposure therapy is great for that. I’m sure there’s endless foxes around here that would be more then happy to help.
Not just extensions but websites as well.
Performative is not the word you intended, but may be apt.
I’ve heard this from others but don’t see meaningful difference myself
Yeah. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s ineffable in that respect. Things like scrolling, etc… just feel a touch off in ways that are difficult to put words to. Not enough to be consciously noticeable; just enough to creep out the lizard-part of your brain that just knows when something doesn’t feel right.
“Performant” means it performs well. Performative means they’re doing something as a performance rather than for substance, doing something just as a show, like Trump reading Bible quotes
Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf really suits my needs, i dont even think about those issues ever since i started using them.
Won’t this eventually affect them as well because this is an update to the underlying chromium engine?
what if you just don’t update? Also librewolf is a fork of firefox not chromium. (I know firefox is finantied or whatever by google. (idk how to spell))
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.
Apparently not, as ads keep selling.
I hate to sound so cynical, but many folks are gullible. They’ll trust a flashy ad because it looks nice to them, and gives them a positive emotional response, and then internalize that judgement as their own decision (so when someone comes to challenge it, they take it personally).
It’s not just old people living in another time, either. I’ve watched teenagers and young adults trust obviously-sponsored influencers like they’re friends. Or wear brands as status symbols.
Ads aren’t always there to get you to buy something specific. In fact, an ad you don’t interact with is a better ad because they don’t have to pay for click-through.
You don’t want to buy brand A because they have ads, so you buy brand B instead, but both widgets are owned by the same holding company. Or they’re made in the same factory. Or they use the same components. Or they have the same shareholders. Any way you slice it, the same rich assholes are getting your money.
The goal of the Ads is to put a bug in your head and get you to buy something.
And that’s just the Ads. The tracking is also (increasingly primarily) about political manipulation and surveillance.
