Google's sales pitch for Manifest V3 is that, by limiting extensions, the browser can be lighter on resources, and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers.
Emphases mine. Funny, I use extensions to protect my privacy from Google.
Chromium needs to be fully divested from Google. End of story. There's too much conflict of interest in letting the world's largest advertising company have this much control over one of the two major browsers. If you don't see the problem with that, imagine if Taco Bell was also the world's largest producer of anti-diarrhea medicine.
As a web developer, Safari needs to either die in a fire or be transferred to a company that actually cares. It’s more than half a decade behind everybody else.
I'm pretty sure ad experience will move some masses, I liked Chrome because Ublock works fine there, it has great extensions support and the best compatibility with the websites, but if you remove the adblocker support I would have moved (if I hadn't already) in a heartbeat
Firefox is my daily, but the fact I have to fire up a chromium browser to use web serial or midi is an endless annoyance. Mozilla won’t add that functionality as they see it as a security risk.
Honestly, in my opinion it kind of is (though I'm not an expert on it). Except for convenience I don't think a browser should be allowed to access my USB devices. Though I would welcome it if it was enabled with the same kind of request that pops up when a browser wants to access the microphone or camera.
For a while I was a bit confused, because Mozilla said they would also implement V3 Manifest ...
by implementing Manifest V3 on its own terms, Mozilla saves developers who are switching to the new platform from having to support two different versions of their extensions (for Google Chrome and Firefox) at the same time. On the other hand, it allows content-blocking extensions that were originally built using the less restrictive Manifest V2 to continue working at full tilt.
Google can go fuck themselves for this. The moment their stupid Manifest v3 bullshit came to light, I quickly migrated to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
I tried using Invidious, but found that it misses quite a lot of new posts in my subscriptions. So in the end I ahemflew to Ukraine to take advantage of family Premium for around £3 a month.
Because honestly, I have no real problem paying for Premium, but I massively object to paying £20 A MONTH to watch (mostly) amateur content that YouTube aren’t actually paying anyone to commission. How is Disney+ almost half the damn cost of a YT Premium family plan? Because Google are money-grubbing cunts, that’s how.
Mine has been working fine, but the instance did lose all my "Mark as watched" videos, and for some reason one specific channel never makes into the Subscriptions panel, but I just have it as a favourite and it ends up almost the same. The instance I was using for Piped is now borked, so I'm hanging onto Invidious for now.
I mean, yeah. They absolutely don't want to be spending bandwidth on those of us who use adblockers. What I don't think a lot of people realize is that Google is perfectly happy with the people who are essentially never served an ad not using the service anymore. Saves them money.
What are we doing differently in Firefox?
WebRequest
One of the most controversial changes of Chrome’s MV3 approach is the removal of blocking WebRequest, which provides a level of power and flexibility that is critical to enabling advanced privacy and content blocking features. Unfortunately, that power has also been used to harm users in a variety of ways. Chrome’s solution in MV3 was to define a more narrowly scoped API (declarativeNetRequest) as a replacement. However, this will limit the capabilities of certain types of privacy extensions without adequate replacement.
Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest. We will continue to work with content blockers and other key consumers of this API to identify current and future alternatives where appropriate. Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we are committed to ensuring that Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.
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A year later, Google is restarting the phase-out schedule, and while it has changed some things, Chrome will eventually be home to inferior filtering extensions.
Google's blog post says the plan to kill Manifest V2, the current format for Chrome extensions, is back on starting June 2024.
The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time.
On the high end now for me, Slack is drinking 500MB, while a single Google Chat tab, created by this company that is so concerned about performance, is at 1.5GB of memory usage.
Google is adding a completely arbitrary limit on how many "rules" content filtering add-ons can include, which are needed to keep up with the nearly infinite ad-serving sites that are out there (by the way, Ars Technica subscriptions give you an ad-free reading experience and make a great holiday gift!).
Mozilla's blog post on the subject promises "Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions."
Funnily enough I think the percentage use of adblockers is going to go up a fair bit thanks to what Google is doing. My amazingly sweet "just go along with anything" MIL actually complained to me about YouTube ads the other day, then ads on websites in general. She jumped at my offer to install a different YouTube client and a good adblocker once I explained that it was a possibility for her tablet.
If they wanted to pull this off they needed to do it quietly, not draw attention to the fact that adblockers exist and are apparently so effective they need to do something very public about them.
You would think, but the number of people I've met who surf the web without any adblockers at all and just seem fine with it is alarming. I think Google is counting on a lot of people just not knowing any better.
Won't stop me from informing them otherwise though.
they already know they have the numbers allowing them not to care.... 'acceptable losses'. its not like they didnt already analyze this decision to death
Adguard and pihole rely on DNS redirects - googs has already implemented "secure DNS" for Chrome in Android, which circumvents network level/local DNS by connecting to a Google owned DNS, serving content using those listings instead.
They'll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
Yes, one should use Firefox. Yes that could also avoid the android problem, but also no, because Google forces chrome at weird times (eg, some apps will load a minimal web viewer for hyperlinks links, without leaving the app - sometimes apps don't respect the default browser setting and instead just use chrome.
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
That's not how that works. Other chromium browsers get to decide what source code they pull into thier own project. They can totally continue using regular DNS.
Adguard and pihole rely on DNS redirects - googs has already implemented “secure DNS” for Chrome in Android, which circumvents network level/local DNS by connecting to a Google owned DNS, serving content using those listings instead.
You can chose many different neutral DNS in AdGuard/Pihole and also in Android (quad9, for instance). In Android I use my own AdGuard Home instance as my DoT server.
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
Inbuilt AdBlockers work well and wont' be affected by MV3, as they are not extensions. Don't spread FUD.
Yes, one should use Firefox.
No need to be so masochistic and I wouldn't use it regardlessly. I don't want to give undeserved market share to corrupt Mozilla Corp. I'd rather watch ads. But, as I said, there's no need for that, because between DNS blocker and inbuilt adblockers of better browsers, I haven't seen a single fucking ad in ages.
Doesn't really matter at this point, I have already uninstalled chrome on all devices at home and work.
I guess Google can still try to slow down other browsers on YouTube and other Google services though.
Trust me when I say this - they will keep pushing until their services are no longer usable at all on anything other than chrome. And they will find enough money to keep the antitrust regulators quiet. Meanwhile a big chunk of those who switched away from chrome will return to it - because principles are not bigger than convenience. Meanwhile, those with enough constitution to stay put will find themselves excluded from a large part of the web - a digital pariah, if you will.
Yeah I don't doubt at all that Google will try. I'm a bit more optimistic than you that we will continue to have ways to get around their bullshit though.