Just remember that Google is essentially an advertising company and that they were always going to squeeze this opening closed as soon as they could get away with it.
I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.
Because Mozilla, at least from the outside appears to have been horribly mismanaged for the past 20-25 years and only survived because the ad money kept rolling in.
I'm not knocking Mozilla for taking money from Google, it was a smart move. Most users would use Google anyway, so Mozilla pocketing billions by making users preferred search engine the default didn't really hurt anyone. Some of that money should however have gone into a trust or some type of investment so that funding for browser development would be safe if the ad money ever dried up.
Maybe someone at Mozilla knows something I don't, but there doesn't seem to be much planning for the future.
Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary?
The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
In this particular context there really isn't any difference. Technically Mozilla isn't in the business of delivering ads, but their revenue is mostly supported by ad money from Google, and Google, being an ad giant, can simply cut that stream off. The common sentiment seems to be that this would spell a life and death situation for the company and for the browser as a whole, which essentially makes Firefox a hostage to the whims of an ideologically hostile corporate entity.
Making Firefox even less desirable by "googlifying" it pushes Firefox users away and kills its image of a viable competitor. That's exactly what Google is paying for.
Why would Google destroy the cover they have for keeping control over Chrome and 70% of internet users, just to squeeze a bit more ad revenue from what, 2% of users?
It's giving Sony. Similar situation where you have a media business and also make some of the distribution channels including engineering of devices used to consume the content.
Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
It's remarkable how often this happens, isn't it? One incident of someone not living up to standards is suddenly an opportunity to abandon standards and go with known bad actors. It's like people giving up on the MSM and immediately latching onto propaganda Youtubers instead.
uBo is the only reason I find browsing the web at all tolerable anymore. As a test I turned it off to view this article and almost crashed my browser with a dozen auto play video ads
This would mean I would find the energy to get over anything that is holding me on chrome, like saved passwords etc.
It's quite possible that we're just not meant to view the web. Those companies that even maintain websites might intend for us to really view things on their phone app. The garbage you see on the website is then not just some parasitic draining of your spiritual health, but a disincentive designed to convince you to stop using the web altogether.
I hope Firefox never drops MV2. I have a lot of other extensions that use it other than uBlock. Can't believe Google really went through with it. We are truly in the end times of "personal" computing, very sad to see :/
But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.
It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.
There are 2 reasons why I'm using chromium (with ublock origin lite) over Firefox:
1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.
2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents
2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat
> 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
Its not the tabs themselves crashing, its when firefox (or my pc as a whole - I'm a developer and its a frequent occurance) crashes, firefox isn't as good as chrome at remembering what tabs were previously open
I switched from Firefox to Chrome a couple of years back because Firefox always dragged its feet when it came to implementing important developer features. Like, DataView was excruciatingly slow in Firefox; WebGPU support didnt go anywhere; and they initially refused to implement import maps. I consider the latter to be an essential tool as it allows me to work without the need for build systems. Also, chrome dev tools worked far better.
Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.
Actually, I opted in for tracking. Knowing my interests, Google suggests good articles on their Android app feed.
Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.
Is that a rhetorical question suggesting those people are wrong, or are you asking for, e.g., the technical reasons some software only works with Chrome in the mix?
Gecko, WebKit and—hopefully—Ladybird are the true alternatives. I used to think this was too extreme. But the ad vendor dragging ad blockers out of the engine flipped my view.
I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs (since Firefox 3);
but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;
For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.
Are you really sure it’s not because of an add-on?
If I remember correctly, Mozilla has said that about 95% of all pages that don’t work aren’t due to Firefox, but to an add-on.
I use Firefox exclusively and don’t usually notice that pages don’t work. When that happens, as I said, it’s almost always an add-on that’s to blame. And I dont notice its buggy or laggy. So check your addons.
Same here, but when a site completely fails in Firefox I either A) use my phone because mobile Firefox occasionally works or B) use Ungoogled Chromium.
Not using many extensions on my case, but Google meet remains unusable for a long time, sound is horrible during meetings. Chrome on the other hand works fine
Ok but if you use it only for testing, and not for your ‘real’ browsing, then probably the fact that they track what you are doing is not that important, even if it’s still a nuisance. Or not?
Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later. BUT. Chrome then will still have uBlock Origin lite. Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store.
Yeah, pissing off the ecosystem is a great way to drive users to your competitors. Requiring users to manually install and update a popular extension is a subpar experience.
It seems they spent so much of their budget on the CEO's salary that they couldn't afford an extension review team.
Quoting open-paren comment:
> As far as I can tell, there are maybe two reviewers that are based in Europe (Romania?). The turn around time is long when I am in the US, and it has been rife with this same kind of "simple mistake" that takes 2 weeks to resolve.
Why wouldn't someone anyone cobble together a v3 version between the uncertain future date in which v2 was deprecated and when it became unavailable. There appears to be no possible future in which google has better adblocking.
So, what's next?
Will Chrome ship with hard coded DNS, so that DNS based adblockers will stop working as well?
Where (and when) does my rights what to display on my devices end?
Ship has already sailed, it's called DoH. Please note, that it is to make your DNS safer and has absolutely nothing to do with removing your ability to resolve DNS in whatever way you want to(cough adblock cough).
I guess I just missed that?!
I'm running a mix of Adguard and nextdns blockers on some of my mobile devices, and both are apparently handling the DoH issue for you; by just blanket blocking the resolvers and/or ports, to force a fallback....
I need a Beer.
I wonder what will Vivaldi do. They say that their built-in content blocker is "good enough" that you supposedly don't need uBO (I very much disagree) but they also keep MV2 extensions working to this day.
How is it half of HN is convinced Firefox can compete with Chrome in its entirety and the other half is convinced nobody can possibly maintain a single additional API version on Chromium?
It's about the tech stack, IMO. Chromium is a moving target to maintain compatibility with, which is difficult for a team that doesn't have much C++ experience.
As a counter example, Brave is heavily invested in C++ and Rust, and I believe they could handle that work much better."
MV3 is actually a faster but less capable version.
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
Normies don't care much about ads, trackers and all that nuisance. I find it astonishing when you see them dodging all that crap while browsing the Internet
Being the maintainer of such a big open-source application as Chrome used to grant dictatorial power: maintaining a fork represented too much work. It only happened in the most awful situations, such as Oracle acquiring OpenOffice.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
The only reason I use Chrome is because its dev tools are better, and for whatever reason, webgl wigs out on Ubuntu 26.04 in Firefox. It's mostly the lag issue though...
Just about obligatory mention of Pale Moon here. Have had a relatively clean internet experience for years with the old Firefox uBlock extension in combination with eMatrix. *Includes a disclaimer because I don't use Youtube and other assorted "social" media websites.
Only need Firefox ESR for a handful of websites giving me no option when specifying a Linux/Mozilla user agent instead of the native one for those doesn't work.
I have been using UBlock Origin Lite on Chrome for a while, and while it's not perfect and needs a bit of manual tweaking here and there, it's been mostly good for me
If they were willing to make exceptions then I would hope the list isn't closed. I view this as the best of the possible worlds not the best of all imaginable worlds.
IMHO it's quite brave that a Google employee working in that area would let his real name be published, and an illuminating view of how they (don't) think.
> Cronin further explained why MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in supported Chrome versions as maintaining the associated functionality indefinitely is no longer possible. He cited growing technical difficulties and implementation complexities as well as security concerns.
You know what else is a security concern? Ads. The amount of mental gymnastics is insane. It's honestly insulting.
Yet another reason to also perform ad blocking at the network level (e.g. DNS). I’ve found AdGuard Home very easy to maintain. Using Firefox and Orion browsers too.
This feels more like a gradual tightening of extension APIs under Manifest V3 than a sudden “kill switch.” uBlock isn’t going away, but its capabilities are definitely being reshaped...
It's all an excuse to try to neuter adblockers. The push for killing MV2 was suspiciously accelerated at the same time that youtube started implementing much more invasive anti-adblock techniques that really needed a full content blocker support (at least until people found new clever workarounds).
Just remember that Google is essentially an advertising company and that they were always going to squeeze this opening closed as soon as they could get away with it.
I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.
Firefox haven't caved in so far. Why do u think it might in future?
Because Mozilla, at least from the outside appears to have been horribly mismanaged for the past 20-25 years and only survived because the ad money kept rolling in.
I'm not knocking Mozilla for taking money from Google, it was a smart move. Most users would use Google anyway, so Mozilla pocketing billions by making users preferred search engine the default didn't really hurt anyone. Some of that money should however have gone into a trust or some type of investment so that funding for browser development would be safe if the ad money ever dried up.
Maybe someone at Mozilla knows something I don't, but there doesn't seem to be much planning for the future.
> the ad money kept rolling in
Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary?
The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
In this particular context there really isn't any difference. Technically Mozilla isn't in the business of delivering ads, but their revenue is mostly supported by ad money from Google, and Google, being an ad giant, can simply cut that stream off. The common sentiment seems to be that this would spell a life and death situation for the company and for the browser as a whole, which essentially makes Firefox a hostage to the whims of an ideologically hostile corporate entity.
While the nuance is important, money from Google is ad money:
So yes, Google gives Firefox money for political reasons. Made from ads, so they can sell ads, including to Firefox users.Technically yes
> Firefox haven't caved in so far. Why do u think it might in future?
Because pretty much all their revenue comes from Google.
I think Google will try to annoy Firefox users into using Chrome instead via things like needless captchas.
Things like https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/06/mozilla-firefox-android-... do not bode well either... :(
All the more reason to keep using Firefox.
Donate if you can!
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/
Donations to Mozilla Foundation do not support Firefox development. But payments for services to Mozilla Corporation do.[1]
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/
Last I heard was that there is no way to be sure that donations to the Mozilla Foundation go to Firefox.
They will do both. Firefox has zero leverage to do anything and is on life support with Google's money.
Making Firefox even less desirable by "googlifying" it pushes Firefox users away and kills its image of a viable competitor. That's exactly what Google is paying for.
Why would Google destroy the cover they have for keeping control over Chrome and 70% of internet users, just to squeeze a bit more ad revenue from what, 2% of users?
It's giving Sony. Similar situation where you have a media business and also make some of the distribution channels including engineering of devices used to consume the content.
Good news is there are many viable Firefox forks currently and I’m sure some of them could take the wheel. It is open source, after all.
It would be a shame to lose the Mozilla foundation/Firefox but it wouldn’t be the end of the browser.
Surprised they still have this page on their site:
> https://about.google/company-info/philosophy/
> 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil.
Hah
> 6. You can make money without doing evil
implies that they're doing it for fun then I guess?
you make some money without doing evil and some more in other ways
Technically, you can make money without doing evil.
Or obligation.
Google only moves fast and breaks things that matter.
Their sunsetting of manifest v2 appears fast to me and updating some corporate philosophy has apparently no business impact.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil.
You can but well, it's more profitable the other way around....
Archive it before they memoryhole it.
Yeah I'd expect someone here will note it and page will get a "deserved" update
Look, we're having a good time on Firefox since November 9, 2004. Come join us!
Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
Right after they reach at least ~80% of customization Vivaldi offers!
Was that the year they fired the Rust team to focus on paying their executives?
Let's not exchange crap behaviour. I think google would win hands down. Firefox at least has adblocking.
The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
It's remarkable how often this happens, isn't it? One incident of someone not living up to standards is suddenly an opportunity to abandon standards and go with known bad actors. It's like people giving up on the MSM and immediately latching onto propaganda Youtubers instead.
No it doesn't. Unlike Brave, Firefox needs an extension to block ads just like Chrome.
or even since 2002 when it started as Phoenix
https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
uBo is the only reason I find browsing the web at all tolerable anymore. As a test I turned it off to view this article and almost crashed my browser with a dozen auto play video ads This would mean I would find the energy to get over anything that is holding me on chrome, like saved passwords etc.
Agree. The web is literally unusable without uBlock Origin. It should be a standard browser feature at this point, like popup blockers.
In addition to uBlock Origin, I also have a few piholes (two locations), and I use NoScript as well. It's nice to have multiple layers of defense.
it _is_ a browser feature for e.g. brave, vivaldi and (experimental, afair) firefox.
Popup blockers were also a differentiator, once.
It's quite possible that we're just not meant to view the web. Those companies that even maintain websites might intend for us to really view things on their phone app. The garbage you see on the website is then not just some parasitic draining of your spiritual health, but a disincentive designed to convince you to stop using the web altogether.
I hope Firefox never drops MV2. I have a lot of other extensions that use it other than uBlock. Can't believe Google really went through with it. We are truly in the end times of "personal" computing, very sad to see :/
Why are people on HN still using Chrome? (or Edge, or Opera…)
I don't, 99.9% of the time.
But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.
It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.
There are 2 reasons why I'm using chromium (with ublock origin lite) over Firefox:
1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.
2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
Some pages do not work in Firefox, so I keep a copy of Chrome around.
It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.
Me too. Many government or banking sites only work properly on Chrome. Anything with Docusign is Chrome-only.
Name and shame?
For me the two reasons I can't live without are
1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents
2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat
Firefox has added highlighting of search terms in the page's scroll bar quite a few versions ago, if you want to give it another spin for that.
Weird, it still only highlights a single occurrence for me if I ctrl-f something, is there a setting for this or something?
Do these Firefox extensions help?
I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-...
Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well!
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
Thanks for this, I'll go have a look
> 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
Its not the tabs themselves crashing, its when firefox (or my pc as a whole - I'm a developer and its a frequent occurance) crashes, firefox isn't as good as chrome at remembering what tabs were previously open
I switched from Firefox to Chrome a couple of years back because Firefox always dragged its feet when it came to implementing important developer features. Like, DataView was excruciatingly slow in Firefox; WebGPU support didnt go anywhere; and they initially refused to implement import maps. I consider the latter to be an essential tool as it allows me to work without the need for build systems. Also, chrome dev tools worked far better.
Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.
Actually, I opted in for tracking. Knowing my interests, Google suggests good articles on their Android app feed.
Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.
Is that a rhetorical question suggesting those people are wrong, or are you asking for, e.g., the technical reasons some software only works with Chrome in the mix?
I'm betting there are a lot of people here using Chrome as their "daily driver".
To people who like Chrome, or some of its features (I love their bookmarks), I say: try Helium. Or Iridium. Or even Brave.
Which one isnt going to get unmaintained first.
Brave, then, I imagine.
Since it underpins so much of the modern browser ecosystem it becomes a primary target for webapps to work.
As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.
Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.
Self-fulfilling cycle.
Locked down computers that still let you install extension.
Work forces me to on the work laptop. But Ublock Origin Lite is good enough for that use-case. I use firefox everywhere else.
Don't know, but I have uninstalled it a few minutes ago.
On lower end cpus (N100) chromium/brave benchmarks 10-20% faster than Firefox.
Even if you factor in all the ad bloat that uBlock lite can’t block?
That's pretty irrelevant isn't it? Shouldn't all users demand privacy, especially from ads?
All users should demand privacy, but they don’t.
Take a look at Firefox’s market share, or Brave’s etc.
Won’t Brave follow Google’s lead on this?
Gecko, WebKit and—hopefully—Ladybird are the true alternatives. I used to think this was too extreme. But the ad vendor dragging ad blockers out of the engine flipped my view.
Brave has its own ad blocker engine built-in rather than as an extension, and it can reuse uBlock's lists
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
I use brave on my phone and I can't really tell the difference from desktop browser+UO, so I guess it works well enough.
> Won’t Brave follow Google’s lead on this?
They said they could offer limited MV2 support even after it’s fully removed from the upstream Chromium codebase.[1]
[1] https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
Brave, like Vivaldi, I think, have developed their own ad blocker.
No idea if they will fight to keep UBlock Origin accessible or not.
I think and certainly hope that Helium will fight the good fight.
I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs (since Firefox 3);
but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;
For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.
Are you really sure it’s not because of an add-on? If I remember correctly, Mozilla has said that about 95% of all pages that don’t work aren’t due to Firefox, but to an add-on. I use Firefox exclusively and don’t usually notice that pages don’t work. When that happens, as I said, it’s almost always an add-on that’s to blame. And I dont notice its buggy or laggy. So check your addons.
Same here, but when a site completely fails in Firefox I either A) use my phone because mobile Firefox occasionally works or B) use Ungoogled Chromium.
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Really hoping the uBlock will continue to work on that project...
How many extensions do you use on laggy FF?
Not using many extensions on my case, but Google meet remains unusable for a long time, sound is horrible during meetings. Chrome on the other hand works fine
only site that was slow on firefox was google meet, but then it turned out someone documented how google had code to explicitly do that. ouch.
Ex-bosses used it so had to test shit on them.
Ok but if you use it only for testing, and not for your ‘real’ browsing, then probably the fact that they track what you are doing is not that important, even if it’s still a nuisance. Or not?
Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later. BUT. Chrome then will still have uBlock Origin lite. Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store.
> Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later.
Source?
> Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store.
It's unbanned; the author chose to not put it back. https://www.ghacks.net/2024/10/01/mozillas-massive-lapse-in-...
Yeah, pissing off the ecosystem is a great way to drive users to your competitors. Requiring users to manually install and update a popular extension is a subpar experience.
It seems they spent so much of their budget on the CEO's salary that they couldn't afford an extension review team.
Quoting open-paren comment:
> As far as I can tell, there are maybe two reviewers that are based in Europe (Romania?). The turn around time is long when I am in the US, and it has been rife with this same kind of "simple mistake" that takes 2 weeks to resolve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710183
There is currently no plan to deprecate V2 manifest in Firefox.
And Firefox version of V3 supports browser.webRequest blocking (the part that adblockers need to work properly)
> Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later.
Got a source for that, or is that just unfounded speculation?
Why wouldn't someone anyone cobble together a v3 version between the uncertain future date in which v2 was deprecated and when it became unavailable. There appears to be no possible future in which google has better adblocking.
So, what's next? Will Chrome ship with hard coded DNS, so that DNS based adblockers will stop working as well? Where (and when) does my rights what to display on my devices end?
Ship has already sailed, it's called DoH. Please note, that it is to make your DNS safer and has absolutely nothing to do with removing your ability to resolve DNS in whatever way you want to(cough adblock cough).
I guess I just missed that?! I'm running a mix of Adguard and nextdns blockers on some of my mobile devices, and both are apparently handling the DoH issue for you; by just blanket blocking the resolvers and/or ports, to force a fallback.... I need a Beer.
I wonder what will Vivaldi do. They say that their built-in content blocker is "good enough" that you supposedly don't need uBO (I very much disagree) but they also keep MV2 extensions working to this day.
Vivaldi said We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium.[1] They kept it before now because it was little effort.
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
They can only support MV2 extensions as long as Google continues to maintain them.
Their tech stack is heavily JavaScript-focused, as their entire UI is written in JavaScript.
How is it half of HN is convinced Firefox can compete with Chrome in its entirety and the other half is convinced nobody can possibly maintain a single additional API version on Chromium?
It's about the tech stack, IMO. Chromium is a moving target to maintain compatibility with, which is difficult for a team that doesn't have much C++ experience.
As a counter example, Brave is heavily invested in C++ and Rust, and I believe they could handle that work much better."
>from our experience, uBO Lite does not seem to be as good as the original non-Lite version
In what way? I've never noticed a difference.
AdGuard MV3 works fine. Still switch to FF if you can, more diversity in the ecosystem benefits everyone.
wasn't mv3 a dumbed down version? So it "does not work just fine" as some ads slip through?
MV3 is actually a faster but less capable version.
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
What ads are slipping through?
Finally Firefox will get a 30% usage share!
I'm confident that Mozilla corporate will find some way to self-sabotage before that happens.
That is my fear. Or get distracted on some ancillary product that takes resources away from FF development.
Just keep making a browser that isn’t shit. That’s your only job!
Normies don't care much about ads, trackers and all that nuisance. I find it astonishing when you see them dodging all that crap while browsing the Internet
Moved to Firefox. Thank you Firefox.
Being the maintainer of such a big open-source application as Chrome used to grant dictatorial power: maintaining a fork represented too much work. It only happened in the most awful situations, such as Oracle acquiring OpenOffice.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
The only reason I use Chrome is because its dev tools are better, and for whatever reason, webgl wigs out on Ubuntu 26.04 in Firefox. It's mostly the lag issue though...
Just about obligatory mention of Pale Moon here. Have had a relatively clean internet experience for years with the old Firefox uBlock extension in combination with eMatrix. *Includes a disclaimer because I don't use Youtube and other assorted "social" media websites.
Only need Firefox ESR for a handful of websites giving me no option when specifying a Linux/Mozilla user agent instead of the native one for those doesn't work.
I have been using UBlock Origin Lite on Chrome for a while, and while it's not perfect and needs a bit of manual tweaking here and there, it's been mostly good for me
Does Brave track or does Brave fork on this?
It seems as if they will track it (https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/), with an exception for a selected few extensions (AdGuard AdBlocker, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix).
The few exceptions being the ones we want. So.. a good outcome.
We want forks or better extensions impossible?
If they were willing to make exceptions then I would hope the list isn't closed. I view this as the best of the possible worlds not the best of all imaginable worlds.
Perhaps good was overkill. Less bad?
I've found Brave's built in ad blocking to be good enough on its own.
Adtech company insists on ramming more unwanted ads down your throat
uBlock Origin Lite gives an identical browsing experience, ad-free. What is all the fuss about?
Your comment was redundant.[1] And contradicted in the uBlock Origin Lite FAQ.[2] And in the article.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472424
[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
IMHO it's quite brave that a Google employee working in that area would let his real name be published, and an illuminating view of how they (don't) think.
AdGuard works fine for me, on YouTube as well.
> Cronin further explained why MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in supported Chrome versions as maintaining the associated functionality indefinitely is no longer possible. He cited growing technical difficulties and implementation complexities as well as security concerns.
You know what else is a security concern? Ads. The amount of mental gymnastics is insane. It's honestly insulting.
"removing Effectively-dead code" nice euphemism for directly killing a feature people desperately want ...
I hope not, I switched from chrome to edge so I can continue using ublock origin.
People still using that POS? :)
Boycott evil companies.
Google : "You will own nothing and like manifest v3"
smiling smugly from planet firefox
Yet another reason to also perform ad blocking at the network level (e.g. DNS). I’ve found AdGuard Home very easy to maintain. Using Firefox and Orion browsers too.
Totally not a monopoly on the browser space /s
uBlock Origin lite exists. And in couple years usage I see no difference from non lite version.
The author of both appears to disagree.
This feels more like a gradual tightening of extension APIs under Manifest V3 than a sudden “kill switch.” uBlock isn’t going away, but its capabilities are definitely being reshaped...
It's all an excuse to try to neuter adblockers. The push for killing MV2 was suspiciously accelerated at the same time that youtube started implementing much more invasive anti-adblock techniques that really needed a full content blocker support (at least until people found new clever workarounds).
Especially since they put no effort into removing even extensions they know are malicious (and who work very well within the MV3 restrictions): https://palant.info/2025/01/20/malicious-extensions-circumve...
It is a "kill switch" - uBlock Origin will no longer work in Chrome 151 (July 28, 2026).
I'm far more faithful to Ublock Origin than I am any specific browser.
Sadly I don't think that's the general case, I've been on FF for decades but there isn't a universe where I use a browser without UBO at this point.
>but there isn't a universe where I use a browser without UBO at this point.
One wouldn't need to be loyal to UBO... a simple with-and-without comparison would be enough for anyone with a functioning brainstem.