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.
Laughs in Firefox based browsers
People will *anything *except use FireFox
Excellent reason for even the normies to ditch chrome 🥂
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.
it’s like people don’t remember what surfing the web was like before ad-blockers. If adblockers go away for real,
peoplenerds will revolt
That’s been the better browser since 2008 though.
happy to not be affected
laughs in Firefox/Librewolf
No worries, play store-recaptcha is coming for you too!
?
affects mobile the most obviously… but google’s playbook is to basically have forced telemetry always and enforce integrity of their telemetry, and by extension advertising etc.
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/07/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement/ - this just seems like an ok article for it, I did a simple web search and it came up, but others certainly exist if you dislike the source.
Looking forward to when they remove the old options & force PC users to scan reCAPTCHA QRs:
Those sites will be dead to me :)
QR codes are like the popups of days gone by. With incredibly few exceptions, I refuse to scan them. They are so easy to redirect for nefarious purposes, and you can’t easily inspect the url to know, assuming thats something you even do. Also my phone case covers the camera and it’s a bitch to get open so I’m very choosy with what gets camera time.
On my phone I use URLCheck (available in f-droid). You set it as your default browser app, but instead of opening a browser, it opens a popup where you can see the URL, and use some useful tools like removing tracking parameters or automatically rewriting x.com to xcancel.com. The rewritten URL can then just be forwarded to your actual browser (or whatever app is set up to handle that particular URL).
I still won’t actually open random qr code URLs though, especially not ones from google.
How do the rewrites work? Is it like Redirector?
Would be awesome if I could just import my Redirector regex json file
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Unfortunately, we’re fighting an uphill battle here.
We’d need government regulation “protecting privacy”, instead they seem all too eager to concede that in a futile effort to " protect the children ".
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
At which point they cease to be your favourites, I hope. There are so many alternatives in that space that only inertia keeps people using the Empire of Evil.
I doubt SearXNG is going to integrate it lmao, and if they do, someone will fork or i will keep using older versions
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Searching is already dead. Every search results in 200 Ai articles full of bullshit, even Qwant or DuckDuckGo.
The corpo-web died already, y’all are just crying over the scraps.
You’re forgetting other countries that will just stop using American tech companies
Waiting for another player…
PRESS START TO JOIN
The MV3 support in firefox is even stricter than in Chrome. I found that chrome will let you sidestep CSP to make an HTTP request. Firefox won’t.
I don’t understand what you found, but firefox still supports the web request blocking API for Mv3 extensions, which is what ublock needs.
I was debugging one of my favourite extensions this week to figure out why it didn’t work on firefox. It hadn’t been updated in years, so something changed in firefox in the last few months.
I assume the Chrome version still works. I’m not installing it.
if it hadn’t been updated in years then it will be an Mv2 extension, irrelevant to discussion of Mv3 strictness.
It was MV3. I had to rewrite the manifest as V2 to get it working.
FF support is getting worse and worse though.
Barely any of the sites I use for work support FF.
Laugh all you want but shit is a bit fucked.
Ladybird is our last best hope and its barely a glimmer.
Fun fact: many sites that say that they don’t support firefox lie, their sites usually support it but they never tested it or they deem firefox “less secure” or some bullshit, but with an useragent spoofer, they will work
(Not all sites ofc)
Removed by mod
I think you should read my reply again, slowly
I’m not talking about sites that claim not to support FF. I’m talking about sites that have broken features when visited in FF.
Do you have any example? Can you send any link? I never experienced those problems myself so i want to try
Chrome is doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by not following web standards. There are several websites I have used where the payment process or uploading process only worked in chrome.
Again, this is a problem with chrome doing things that breaks consistency between browsers that are supposed to be following the same web standards.
This is very well documented, and a very common experience.
They were talking about exactly this on late night linux podcast just last week.
That isn’t FF support. That is chrome doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by implementing non-standard functionality to abuse their market dominance.
Sure but if devs don’t test sites in Firefox then very they don’t support Firefox.
why would those sites support ladybird if they don’t support firefox?
Oh look all the “chrome but in a different outfit” browsers are doing the same terrible shit? What a shocker, no one could have predicted that the many many things all on the same base where actuality just fake competition.
Firefox has webserial support now. I no longer need anything chromium. Let them rot.
What is it used for?
Communicating with external devices via USB or the old D-Sub connectors.
Printers, microcontrollers, instruments, etc… Directly instead of through the OS.
Notably, ESPHome Programmer uses it for flashing ESP32s wired. Other companies like Solo Motor Controllers use it for delivering a user GUI to customers that is always updated but that can switch between versions instantly for production without having to having to deal with window’s broken method of having to manually search and download .exes for every program.
never heard of it till now. neat!
I had to use Brave earlier this year to flash firmware onto a Meshtastic device. It’s good to hear that Firefox has that option now.
Even grapheneOS use it for adb into your phone to flash the images.
webserial
they use WebUSB in GrapheneOS
Where oh where is my PWA…?
“Coming soon…”
Really? Holy shit I can switch to zen fully at work and at home and uninstall chromium. Webserial was literally the only thing I needed
I heard about the web usb thing, it’s also going to be a game changer for me (I haven’t tried yet, hopefully it works)
It does? Guess I can finally yeet Chromium from my machine then.
How about bluetooth support? Has that been fixed yet?
Why the downvotes? I have 4 machines at work, and none of them can send code to a LEGO Spike Hub over bluetooth in Firefox but works perfectly fine in Chrome.
They are all chrome with google scratched out and their name written in sharpie in its place.
Of course they are all doing it, cause they are all the same thing.
They don’t even try to pretend to fight it.
because theres no fighting google.
Microsoft tried, and google won, which is why Edge became a chrome reskin instead of what it was before.
Microsoft “tried” about as well as a quadraplegic “tries” free climbing
The winning move is not to do business with them, don’t compete just exist and pretend they don’t exist. Microslop played the game and lost, but it is a stupid silly game.
kinda hard to do when google holds the internet by the balls. and can twist at any moment to get what they want.
Microsoft and Mozilla employees have both accused them of doing this in the past, to sabotage non-chrome browsers on google services, to make chrome look better and drive users to chrome.
News to me, Does google hold this site by the balls? They have a lot of power yes, but they are not some unsinkable boat.
They only ‘hold the internet by the balls’ if you are using and reliant on Google products.
There are hundreds (if not more) tutorials and lists online to guide you through degoogling
I’m sure we can get thousands of websites and every major corporation to degoogle cause you said they should.
All the FF forks are the same. Soft forks.
Pale Moon is not a soft fork.
Define soft fork
Can hold spaghetti but not a meatball 😔
ohhh, thanks!
God it still pisses me off what they did to my boy Opera. All of us left when they diverted after v12. We all saw this coming.
Then Vivaldi came which I have tried in quite a while but it sucked. Firefox it is.
I like Vivaldi except for two things: it uses the same engine as Chrome so facilitates Google’s stranglehold on web standards, and it is closed-source. For functionality and design it’s one of the best, but those are important downsides.
What about vivaldi sucked for you?
Chrome is death to a browser, there is little reason to exist if google gets to make the big calls.
Yeah opera used to be the one. I’m STILL pissed that they deleted all of my notes
I mean, on a technical level chromium isn’t a terrible browser engine. Building your own engine from scratch is Extremely Hard™ and it’s entirely possible to build a decent browser on top of it, so I can understand why most alternative projects have done just that.
It’s just… google’s control over chromium is concerning.
And an ecosystem of one engine is not healthy. Even if google was not google, this is a massive risk to take for the Easy™ way.
It’s not an ecosystem of one, though one is very dominant.
You can compare it to Linux. It’s not the only Unix-like kernel, but it’s similarly dominant. If you want to create a new distribution, it doesn’t make any sense to spend a decade trying to write your own kernel rather than just using the Linux kernel (insert GNU Hurd jokes here).
Is that an unhealthy ecosystem then? I don’t think it is.
What makes the chromium situation unhealthy is Google’s ownership and control, not that it’s the preferred engine for other browsers. I mean, even a company as large as Microsoft gave up trying to create their own engine.
Your example is a poor choice, Linux overall is one example of an OS for users. There are more OS choices then Linux, that is good. Nothing like web browsers where people where actively trying to make everything chromium based. The ecosystem is unhealthy when there is one choice for an entire type of software (so for OS you have Linux, Windows, and Mac as big players) and outside of Firefox and its forks all web browsers are Chromium based. Oh and although there are other fringe options they don’t matter much, much like in the OS world Temple OS is not a real choice.
My point was that it would be very very bad if Firefox was not there (or turned into chromium) as an ecosystem of one is a massive risk regardless of who controls it.
It’s a damn shame, I’ve always liked Vivaldi otherwise. I’ve been dual running Vivaldi and Firefox for years now, Vivaldi for casual browsing and Firefox for more serious stuff + YouTube.
Oh well, it’s time to do a full switch, I guess.
Kinda funny, I’ve been doing the exact same thing with Win/Linux for approximately the same length of time. Needed Win because of dome software that just doesn’t work linux, and sadly, I still do.
Google and Microsoft can go fuck each other with a frozen cactus for all I care.
The folks at Vivaldi have been doing some work on their internal ad blocker, I think with the intention to bring most of the functionality of uBo internally so that it doesn’t have to be an extension. Not sure how far along they are, but maybe they’re intentionally keeping it quiet.
Vivaldi have earned and deserve a lot of trust here I believe. All my chromium eggs sit in their basket.
Same here. I’m an Opera refugee so to say (and I had high hopes for Opera actually). I’ve been using Vivaldi since its first public alpha/preview/whatever they were calling it.
Yup, Vivaldi user for 8 years and it hasn’t let me down yet, but this post is troubling news.
Aye, I’m just not sure how it’s going to play out. One can hope, though. It’s definitely one of the best options Chrome-wise either way.
I’m wondering what the decision making was when they were starting (which is now 10 years ago already, time flies, yo).
From today’s perspective, a Firefox fork sounds way more logical. Back then maybe things with Blink/Chromium weren’t looking so grim, maybe they were relying on the experience of that part of the team that moved over from Opera…
10 years ago Google was trusted and liked. The cracks were starting to show, but we’re talking about the Google that was still open sourcing a lot of their products and loudly opposing government censorship of the internet.
Yeah its a real surprise. :)
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
Another zen user, good to hear!
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.
Where is ladybird browser? They should just release it
Patience! They have recently rewritten a part in Rust. See the news.
You can try it is not that difficult
You won’t like it though
Firefox+uBO works fine. Brave shields works fine.
Pretty fucked up considering how much malware and scammy bullshit come though ads.
Yep, sorry but not sorry. Advertisements aren’t safe. The industry has been ruined by bad actors and it’s a shame, but also not my problem.
I worked in ads only a few months and learned how fucked that industry was. They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser, sucking as much info as they can. The fact that it hasn’t been regulated to hell is shocking, and truly a failure of all leaders.
They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser
That’s the crazy thing.
You want to show me an image, maybe an animated gif, and link it to your website where you’re selling shit? Fine. Annoying, but fine.
But I don’t care how many crocodile tears they shed about ‘but websites depend on ad income’ – I am not letting random, unvetted advertisers run arbitrary code on my computer. I don’t care if it’s in a sandbox inside a sandbox. Exploits may be found, sandboxes may be escaped. And there’s plenty of trouble they can get into even within their little sandbox, like running a fucking crypto miner or something.
So, yeah. Adblock and noscript everywhere and always.
Yes, they can host a GIF on their server & show it to me with a non-personalized link, & promote it where they believe the average reader might be interested in it. Or some reader(s).
Just show me the ads you’re showing everybody else, and make money from sales of useful things & services.
It’s not even that hard to have targeted ads while still respecting privacy – just base the targeting on the other content on the page, rather than on the user.
Honestly, <looks at current governments> not that shocking.
Internet Browsers store way too much data and have waaaay too many permissions. It’s sickening.
not enough, what they want is personal data to mine. they cant do that in simple terms. meta, glassdoor, indeed , linkden,(plaid) tries to use convoluted mehtods to get you to give up more personal data than you normally would in order to access the rest of the site.(glassdoor and indeed has an additional reason to want you ridentiy)
It’s because people don’t go into these offices with fire and guns. If a bunch of advertising people were slaughtered every few weeks things may get better.
Same goes for collections, eventually no one will want to do the job.
The whole industry is bad actors. The quaint, pastoral idea of actually advertising things you genuinely might want to know about is utterly beyond dead, it died the moment they realized they could use the same pipeline to harvest data and manipulate and control people. Using it for mere advertising is a waste of everyone’s time and resources when they have an option so much more lucrative on the table.
It’s everyone’s problem in a way…
Over 10 years ago someone at my office had their work PC and user drive encrypted with ransomware because of a bad ad injection from one of those job search sites. Thankfully it was limited to nothing critical and incremental backups restore the drive…but hopefully they found a good lead because they were canned.
If they’d had a good ad blocker this would have been a non issue
I work in IT: Pretty much all the malware we deal with comes from ads. I’ve pitched making ad blocking standard but they never go for it, even though it’s clear it would prevent an absolute shit ton of attacks. It’s crazy!
Seriously. If Google really wants to shove ads down our throats, they could at least regulate them so they’re not constantly horny scams. But that would cost them money, oh the humanity.
Librewolf gang rise up
So many people asked “Why not Opera?” When I jumped off the AI browsers.
This. This is why. Didn’t trust em.
I don’t think it’s a matter of Opera being untrustworthy as much as it is the fact that they’re a Chromium-based browser, same as Edge.
I’m just curious as to how this is going to affect duckduckgo browser since DDG is a fork of Edge.
LibreWolf user since a few months ago.
Has the Librewolf team developed a mobile fork yet?
No, and do not intend to. But I remember they recommended Ironfox, which is very similar and good, imo.
Is Ironfox capable of interfacing with Librewolf? As in sharing bookmarks and credentials? Because to tell you the truth that is the one thing that is holding me to Firefox.
Whether you use Firefox or Librewolf you are entirely dependent on the hundreds of full timer developers Mozilla’s got working on the Gecko codebase.
librewolf broke too many websites for me to reasonably keep using it :(
also just keep in mind: it’s lack of a fingerprint now becomes the fingerprint.
The default settings do break quite a few sites, but after 10 mins of tweaking it works like Firefox but without all the AI bullshit and adverts
Uh, nothing has been broken for me I think, some minor stuff don’t work but I don’t need them really.
How does it compare to Firefox?
And people still use these trash dumpster of a browser?
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.
