As uBlock Origin lead developer and maintainer Raymond Hill explained on Friday, this is the result of Google deprecating support for the Manifest v2 (MV2) extensions platform in favor of Manifest v3 (MV3).
“uBO is a Manifest v2 extension, hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no Manifest v3 version of uBO, hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replacement for uBO,” Hill explained.
↫ Sergiu Gatlan at Bleeping Computer
If you’re still using Chrome, or any possible Chrome skins who have not committed to keeping Manifest v2 extensions enabled, it’s really high time to start thinking about jumping ship if ad blocking matters to you. Of course, we don’t know for how long Firefox will remain able to properly block ads either, but for now, it’s obviously the better choice for those of us who care about a better browsing experience.
And just to reiterate: I fully support anyone’s right to block ads, even on OSNews. Your computer, your rules. There are a variety of other, better means to support OSNews – our Patreon, individual donations through Ko-Fi, or buying our merch – that are far better for us than ads will ever be.
This is such a travesty. Of course I hate that google are doing this, but big business is going to big business. As users, we have the responsibility of voting with our feet. Collectively we are allowing it to happen. We chose to promote google’s browser monopoly. We have only ourselves to blame for the alternative browser market shares crumbling,
Unfortunately this impacts all of us, even those of us who don’t use chrome will feel the crunch. Remember when google was experimenting with interfering with adblockers under firefox on youtube last year? That’s a sign of things to come. More websites will only support chrome. When people had the opportunity to switch to alternatives, we didn’t take it. If anything more people have been leaving FF to boycott mozilla’s efforts to raise money despite the hypocrisy of going google. These developments are an unmitigated disaster for the open web. I don’t want a single company to have so much influence over the web, but here we are, seemly having learned nothing from the IE monopoly.
Are you telling me that Google subsidizing a high-quality open-source browser out of their pocket wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts but to control the web? I am shocked… shocked I tell you… well… not that shocked.
The smart thing they did was making Chrome partially open-source (providing the implicit “you can always fork under a different name” assurance), but keeping the syncing bits proprietary, thus maintaining proprietary lock-in.
kurkosdr,
Yes, I see that “At least you can fork” has some appeal. Some people may think there’s no issue because chromium can be forked, but I’m still very concerned that chromium forks can be sabotaged & manipulated too. It was just last year google were pushing for web-drm, which could have enforced mandatory compliance even across forks since only compliant browsers would get the DRM. Uncertified browsers or those with unauthorized extensions could loose access to content.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/browser-developers-push-back-on-googles-web-drm-wei-api/
Thankfully chrome’s competitors pushed back, but that was one battle in an ongoing war over who controls the web.
1) google could go for web DRM again
2) chromium forks, even collectively, don’t have critical mass.
3) Booting ublock from chrome may result in ublock loosing critical mass even if alternatives forks continue to support it.
4) google can deteriorate the experience for ublock users regardless of whether they are running chromium forks or not.
Alfman,
The biggest obstacle will be maintaining the older API within the new Chromium releases.
This would be similar to open source ARM distributions trying to keep up with latest Linux and older drivers at the same time. Chromium will have moved on, whereas ublock origin and other “manifest v2” extensions will have to target a now obsolete API.
It won’t be as simple as “flipping a switch, and building binaries”. Unfortunately the situation would be worse.
kurkosdr,
Times have changed.
The reason Google produced Chrome was the web was in a terrible shape, and they could not compete if the open web was to fall. Additionally their online apps like GMail was held back by terribly slow JavaScript engines.
However the management of that day, along with many of the engineers have moved on.
Today’s Google, has a different mission, and unfortunately, that is not aligned with the original one.
My main driver is safari with ab+, i have firefox to handle social medias and online store. I use brave for everything shady plus ad free YouTube.
Good ideas dont need advertisement to spread around.
I have never found a site that didn’t work with Firefox. I do not know why people use chrome. I’ve always found it to be inferior.
The video background on my website does not display on firefox. (Advanded WordPress Background). Otherwise i see no difference for my usage.
There is always going to be DRM issues, unfortunately.
From Google:
While I was aware of this I thought Edge supported 1080P. Has this also changed. (of even the windwos store app as another question (I thought that was much abandoned))
My viewing habits changed,. While I still have a netflix sub. Since I stopped a lot on TV I obvbiously got rid of 4K Since no purpose (unless i got back to a firestick into the HDMI port on my comoputer monitor which I did for a while, it was a pain (mainly becuase of no auto way to switch windows to single monitor (yes a simple keypress but too much for me))).
I haddly use chrom except on chromebook and I really do not use that. Firefox, Pale Moon, Edge (yes for certain reasons (and pale moons is just seperate evvironments for seperate things which is still (a lot) easier with multiple browsers)).
Carrot007,
I would agree. Yes, a “HDMI stick” is currently the best way to consume streaming content, not only less worries about DRM, but it uses less power as well.
That being said, web DRM might potentially enter other domains like banking or work applications like Slack, which would further complicate open source usage.
well i guess its time to start using a local DNS to block the ads in the local newtwork if nothing works in the browser, it might not be for everyone but i guess someone might sort that out too
I went with a PiHole sitting on an old Pi3 I had lying around.
Involves little more than running a script, setting a static IP, and changing your DNS to point to it. Done.
The reality is browser based options are always playing a losing game and running your own is so simple these days that I’d recommend anyone do do it who understands the terms above!
Adurbe,
If DNS based blocking is good enough for you then go for it, but there are two things to be aware of:
1) It’s less capable compared to what extensions can do.
For example, one of my ublock filters is:
This blocks the google sign in tracker/popup that seems to be all the rage on websites these days.
https://lifehacker.com/you-can-disable-google-sign-in-pop-ups-on-all-websites-1849913714
Ublock is able to block that popup everywhere via it’s url, but a DNS blocker has a granularity problem and can only block the entire domain.
2) Browsers have started phasing out local DNS in favor of DNS over HTTPS, bypassing local DNS. It’s still possible to switch back for now, but it might not always be the case in the future. “Security” is vendors’ favorite excuse for adding restrictions and I wouldn’t be surprised if this excuse gets used to kill off local DNS; stay tuned.
So many “savvy” people around the web defiantly stating they’re going to switch to Firefox. They should never have used chrome in the first place.
Shifu,
The main reason people switched to Chrome from Firefox is, or rather was… Chrome worked just better. Firefox was slow, crashing, and did not support all the latest web features.
(Look at the market share section at the bottom from 2012):
https://www.diffen.com/difference/Firefox_vs_Internet_Explorer
Firefox became competitive again when they dropped their multi-platform XUL framework:
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/mozilla-changes-firefox-apis-developers-unhappy/
But it was too little and too late. All their great plugins (like Download Them All! or ad blockers) depended on the older API. And that did not leave a nice taste in people, even though it was the right move looking back.
sukru,
Chrome has long had it’s own bad reputation too. There’s been countless memes about chrome’s bloat for a decade with some users ditching chrome for FF because of said bloat.
reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/aj5aks/this_is_your_ram_and_this_is_your_ram_on_chrome/
techradar.com/news/im-sick-of-chrome-eating-all-my-ram-its-time-for-me-to-ditch-it-for-firefox-or-even-edge
reddit.com/r/memes/comments/qe1qho/chrome_ram_eater/
I also want to point out that chrome had a huge marketing advantage over FF. Not only could google bundle it with android, but they paid OEMs and software developers to bundle it on windows too. I don’t know if you remember this, but chrome installers came bundled with so much downloadable software back in the day. If you didn’t uncheck it: boom you had chrome. This IMHO is the biggest reason chrome’s market share grew so rapidly. “Normal users” rarely go out of their way to switch browsers from what’s already there.
Alfman,
It was a gradual process. At the beginning Chrome was really awesome. Today not so much. In between there was a decline with increasing problems.
The main advantage was the v8 JavaScript engine.
There is a reason an entire ecosystem (Node.JS, Electron, React) was built on top of it:
https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/the-v8-javascript-engine
sukru,
I’d agree with you that mozilla has done unpopular things with their power users. I get the distinct impression that Mozilla wanted to design FF around normal users and de-emphasize power users. Which might have worked out ok if they had access to normal users, but they didn’t have access. The users who DO go out of their way to choose FF were the very power users they were pissing off. 🙁
Alfman,
True.
And their “adventures” (like Mozilla OS project to catch up with Chrome OS/Android), or many other failed projects did not help either. They lost too much goodwill and energy.
Chrome is not an inherently bad browser. Modern politics has tarnished it somewhat, but that’s just Google doing what Google does. Their old tag line of “Don’t be evil” has been untrue for some time now.
I recently adopted Firefox with the imminent deprecation of Manifest V2. It’s a good browser, but it’s not Chrome, and there’s a lot that Chrome does well that Firefox just doesn’t, I don’t think i’ll adopt another Chromium based browser in a hurry, but i might not always stick to Firefox. I can see myself adopting a Firefox fork if i stumble across one that supports my use case better.
Of course, that is as long as i stick to one of the big three OSes. I’d love to daily drive Haiku, but there’s a lot it just isn’t up to at this point. I think it will get there one day, but i’ve been saying this since the Alpha days…
I could use haiku as my only OS just fine if i only had sound over HDMI, but i have been waiting for that for many years, and i do not think anyone is working on that at the moment.
NaGERST,
The main issue with many “small” alternatives is, there is always more work to be than then the available resources.
It is also true for larger companies of course. But they (1) have longer legacy to have solves basic issues, (2) they have a … larger … employee base, and can work on not only P1 and P2, but sometimes P3 as well (forget about P4s being expedited anywhere).
So which Chromium browser will still support Manifest v2 extensions for a while? I thought Chrome would still keep compatibility around as an enterprise feature for a bit longer.
It looks like some of the Chromium browsers plan on extended Manifest v2 support using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy, which would mean until June 2025. Beyond that, I have not seen any popular Chromium web browser commit to Manifest v2 beyond that date. The one that would probably have the best chance of doing so would be Opera since they operate their own extension store (https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/) which does support Manifest V2. I doubt they decide to do so, so most likely after June 2025 your only choice will be Firefox if you wish to continue using Manifest v2 based on what I am reading.