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.
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.
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
Edit: These are the benchmarks I ran
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.