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Ad-block developers fear end is near for their extensions:
Seven months from now, assuming all goes as planned, Google Chrome will drop support for its legacy extension platform, known as Manifest v2 (Mv2). This is significant if you use a browser extension to, for instance, filter out certain kinds of content and safeguard your privacy.
Google's Chrome Web Store is supposed to stop accepting Mv2 extension submissions sometime this month. As of January 2023, Chrome will stop running extensions created using Mv2, with limited exceptions for enterprise versions of Chrome operating under corporate policy. And by June 2023, even enterprise versions of Chrome will prevent Mv2 extensions from running.
The anticipated result will be fewer extensions and less innovation, according to several extension developers.
Browser extensions such as Ghostery Privacy Ad Blocker, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger, along with scripting extensions including TamperMonkey, which are each designed to block adverts and other content and/or protect one's privacy online, are expected to function less effectively, if they can even make the transition from Mv2 to the new approach: Manifest v3.
"If you asked me if we can have a Manifest v3 version of Privacy Badger, my answer is yes, we can and we will," said Alexei Miagkov, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a phone interview with The Register. "But the problem is more insidious. It's that Manifest v3 caps the certain capabilities of extensions and cuts off innovation potential."
Google argues otherwise and maintains its platform renovation will meet developers' needs, including those making tools for content blocking and privacy. The internet titan, which declined to comment on the record, maintains that Mv3 aims to improve privacy by limiting extensions' access to sensitive data and that it has been working with extension developers to balance their needs with those of users.
Google points to past endorsements, such as remarks provided by Sofia Lindberg, tech lead of ad amelioration biz Eyeo, which makes Adblock Plus. "We've been very pleased with the close collaboration established between Google's Chrome Extensions Team and our own engineering team to ensure that ad-blocking extensions will still be available after Manifest v3 takes effect."
[...] Google began work on Manifest v3, the successor to Mv2, in late 2018, ostensibly to make extensions more secure, performant, and private. The company's extension platform renovation was necessary – because extension security problems were rampant – and immediately controversial. An ad company making security claims that, coincidentally, hinder user-deployed content and privacy defenses looks like self-interest.
And Mv3 remains the subject of ongoing debate as the extension platform capabilities and APIs continue to be hammered out. But it has been adopted, with some caveats, by other browser makers, including Apple and Mozilla. Makers of Chromium-based browsers inherit Mv3 and Microsoft has already endorsed the new spec.
Others building atop Chromium like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi have indicated interest in continuing to support Mv2, though it's unclear whether that will be practical beyond June of next year. If Google removes the Mv2 code from Chromium, maintaining the code in a separate Chromium fork may prove to be too much trouble.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @12:40PM (7 children)
If (the general) You could stop moaning about the UI: Firefox. You'll survive using it, you'll be all right and you'll be better off than using Chrom*.
Suck it up, the UI's not that bad. Firefox is not anymore horrible than other browsers (quite the opposite all things considered).
FF is not _ideal_ but it is perfectly suitable for the job and it is oodles better than anything Chrome-based.
If you keep bitchin' and moaning about the FF's UI as many have done for over 10 years now, there's always lynx.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by unauthorized on Friday June 10 2022, @01:33PM (5 children)
If you're going to use modern FF, at least use LibreWolf [librewolf.net] which is a rebranded Firefox that cuts out the tracking.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @04:30PM (4 children)
To kill the telemetry in Firefox, in a file named, "user.js" in the profile directory, add:
Yes, pretty ridiculous, and that was just telemetry/tracking. To turn disable all the BS anti-features that mozilla has been adding:
$ wc -l user.js
917 user.js
And, yet still a million times more privacy/user respecting than Chrome/chromium.
There is a mozilla bug tracker ticket where they are discussing getting rid of user.js in *all* platforms because of a bug/design flaw in *Windows* that makes the windows version of firefox stall on initial startup when checking for the existence of the user.js file. That would be the end of firefox for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @04:35PM (1 child)
Even if they got rid of user.js they'd probably still support the site wide configuration which is installed somewhere under /usr/lib or /etc ... check your distro.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @08:16PM
Thanks.
I have sort of a build system for firefox profiles, and use a diff profile for each type of use. E.g., a general default profile for general browsing that doesn't allow scripts or cookies, a banking/financial services sites profile that by default allows cookies and scripts, a shopping profile that allows, but deletes cookies on tab close, etc., These have a bunch of profile specific config in user.js and misc. other files, but share a large amount of common config. In addition, the "build system" customizes each profile per hardware specific features like diff font scaling for diff screen dpi on diff machines (I guess this machine specific config would still work with just one machine-wide config file).
It works well (although ffox has been pulling settings out of about:config and moving them into random sqlite and json files and such for a few years now, so it is sometimes a pita when LTS version changes to get everything working again). And, I recently gave up trying to keep my userchrome.css UI customizations working after each update.
(Score: 2) by Jiro on Friday June 10 2022, @10:20PM
Mine als has devtools.onboarding.telemetry.logged which also probably needs to be set to false.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11 2022, @08:59AM
They already started to do this with the chrome/userChrome.css file.
The complaint was that checking for this file causes a 1 second delay, so checking for it is disabled unless you have a flag turned on. There are a lot of posts out there for fixing irritating problems that Firefox refuses to have an interface option to disable, such as the star Bookmark this Page icon in the urlbar, for which can only be disabled via userChrome.
It really does look like they don't care. Perhaps one day Firefox will adopt manifest v3 and just die.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday June 10 2022, @02:23PM
If you're currently a Chrome user, you'll not complain about the UI. After all, the problem with Firefox's UI is that they made it too much like Chrome.
But then, my main complaint with current Firefox is the loss of the old extensions. Well, it seems that Chrome will suffer an even worse loss.
Anyway, I'll keep using Waterfox Classic as long as possible, with Firefox as backup for sites that don't work with Waterfox Classic, and Chromium as last resort alternative.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.