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/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.
Waiting for another player…
PRESS START TO JOIN
Corpo banned it for compatibility with crap code apparently
Zen is excellent.
For people who want an opinionated browser… Yes. They have sponsored shortcuts which cannot be disabled and they ghost out the option to in the settings. If you want to dig around the about:config and tweak things, fine, but I’d rather use a browser I can make my own. Librewolf is excellently bare bones.
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.
Honestly, <looks at current governments> not that shocking.
Internet Browsers store way too much data and have waaaay too many permissions. It’s sickening.
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.
It’s everyone’s problem in a way…
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.
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
The more you tighten your grip, Google, the more ad revenue will slip through your fingers.
They could have sat on 30 second ads every 15 minutes till the cows came home and most of us would have been fine with it.
They could have sat on premium family for $9 a month for years and we’d have been ok with it.
They had to be greedy as fuck until none of us want to use their services.
The line has to go up. That is literally the law. The fact that Youtube has a larger income than Disney doesn’t mean it will stop. They can never stop. They just can crash and burn down eventually but only after making a few people very very rich.
Not after they demonstrate the power of their evil browser. In a way, you have determined the choice of the ads that you will be shown first.
Government becomes more fascist, tech companies become more fascist.
People don’t like surveillance advertising, and most reject it when given the choice. Unpopular policies are squashed when the people are represented, and the Republican policies and interests of forced and extreme deregulation are being represented here, not the people’s.
That, and I believe advertising is inherently fascistic in the way that it distorts realty, and intrusively attempts to modify thinking with punitive, insulting, and psychologically coercive methods - it is corporate propaganda, and when it is combined with surveillance and purchased by the State, it becomes fascism.
I can’t wait for them to try and make ad-blocking illegal. We’re seeing a similar trend with the age verification firm Yoti “reporting” GrapheneOS users to “the authorities”, whatever the hell that Gestapo bullshit scare-tactic means. If FOSS software and ad-blocking are tools of privacy and freedom from thought manipulation, and those concepts are being attacked by a State-backed corporate entity, then the State no longer represents those values. Chrome, like so much other corporate software that has sunk to surveillance advertising with a healthy side of selling data to the government, is now just another fascist tool to punish democratic resistance.
Freedom from advertising is a human right.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …
~Edward Bernays From his 1928 publication - Propaganda
Edward is the father of modern advertising through psychological manipulation.
He’s the reason bacon and eggs are breakfast.
Who here actually uses these shitass browsers?
Here on Lemmy, not many.
Its about 75% of the world though.
the average person on lemmy probably cares more about privacy than the average internet dweller.
The average internet dweller doesn’t even know they’ve lost privacy.
after all, their post has a delete button next to it and their messages say private! They wouldn’t just lie
100%
Even many, many lemmy users believe there is a semblance of privacy on the internet today, or in national businesses with modern IP camera tech. It’s all gone.
They have enough telemetry to know who you are between all the details the browser gives them. Hell, most people don’t even know what a tracking pixel is or how it has been used for well over a decade.
We’re at the point with machine learning that the resources required to process all of these datapoints is trivial even when done onboard fairly cheap devices.
Here? We’re a rounding error not worth considering.
The majority of users do not use any web browser. They “click on the internet”.
Basically everyone who’s not a techy person (unless their PC was set up by someone who is I suppose).
I have degoogled Chromium installed because some things only work in a chrome browser. However it’s a special use case and I would barely notice if ublock was gone. I wouldn’t use it as a main browser anyway.
I have to use it at work.
I don’t like it. I doing use it elsewhere, but it’s mandatory.
Good thing I don’t use any of those shitty browsers.
I see a lot of comments (justifiably) touting firefox’s superiority… but the performance difference is night and day.
My main pc has very weak hardware, and my browser is the most resource intensive application I run. In my environment, I can’t leave firefox open with other heavy apps running simultaneously, but I can leave chrome open.
I’ve used firefox for decades in the past, but the gap is huge and it doesn’t look like Mozilla will make the engine changes necessary to close it. Idk if things have changed, but I remember when they axed the Servo team.
I’ve been using Ungoogled Chromium and I’m hoping this doesn’t affect me for a while… but if I have to choose between ads and closing my browser to run heavy apps, I guess I’ll be reinstalling firefox.
the performance difference is night and day
People say this, but… performance for what? To show us ads?
I’d much rather take the slightly-lower-performance browser that doesn’t show ads. My brain cycles count as performance too.
Mozilla thought it would be a great idea to install AI features in Firefox and that brilliant decision may be causing your issue. Those AI features use an absurd amount of resources on some websites and when they’re enabled on my laptop, FF regularly shows ~50% CPU.
When all that BS is turned off CPU use drops to less than 2% most of the time. Search for “AI Controls” in settings and try shutting them all off.
I did my testing before the AI features were implemented, and I tested a variety of custom profile settings for firefox (and floorp and librefox) and custom chrome flags for ungoogled chromium (and brave)…
Granted, I was using benchmarks, but the differences are somewhere around 15-30% on my machine on Arch
Interesting running those… Haven’t had to worry about benchmarks on my system, both Chrome and FF are plenty fast. I do wonder how the performance of Chrome with ads would compare to Firefox with the same ads blocked? Every once in a while I use some one else’s computer and can’t believe how many animated ads show up on pages I frequent.
Do you just put up with the ads or block them another way?
Have you tried tweaking user.js?
I don’t feel bad for people who whine about “well, I have to go into the settings and change a thing”. How much did you pay for that browser again? Complacency is what keeps people in abusive ecosystems. Don’t be complacent or you’re part of the problem.
Brave and Vivaldi have built-in ad blockers. Brave’s is based on uBO; Vivaldi’s is based on ABP.
And uBlock will work on Vivaldi until it is absolutely blocked in the chromium core.
my boss (of 20+ years) abuses an old core2duo era desktop (8gb ram and sata ssd, both upgrades from original specs when 10 was put on) with 150+ tab firefox plus word and excel and voice software all going at once. never shuts down, never closes an application. sleeps, wakes, hibernates on weekends. it just keeps going. she’s never had any problems and it runs really well. she’d be bitching if it didn’t.
same, chromium is much faster on a core2duo…
Even if all of this is true, I would rather have uBlock Origin and worse performance.
In other words, it won’t affect me or most of the people who use uBlock.
Ludites unite, might be time to go back to the old ways.
More freedom coming straight from The Land Of THe Free©.
Man, I panicked at first because I have to use Edge at work. But this article clickbaited me, as uBlock origin lite is good enough for most people.
Still, screw Chrome, Edge, and Opera for being such dicks. It’s always those three being the bottom tier browsers…
Remember that article awhile back about the FBI recommending you use an adblocker?
That means even the FBI recommends you don’t use Google and Microsoft browsers anymore
It’s a good thing I don’t use any of those. Although I’m sure something will come along that will get around those fixes. Something always does.
Yeah and most websites are barely functional with all the ad insertion bullshit. Weather.com is practically useless without an ad blocker.
uBlock Origin Light works fine. In fact I prefer it for the most part. They should have found better ways to provide the exact same features in MV3 though even if that meant additional warnings or prompts. I get why declarative requests provide more privacy and safety, but there will always be power users who’d rather have more choice.
