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.
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.
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.