Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone
165 points by ipsum2 2 days ago
The latest version of Chrome (138) removes Manifest v2 and all extensions that rely on it.
165 points by ipsum2 2 days ago
The latest version of Chrome (138) removes Manifest v2 and all extensions that rely on it.
This is the right answer, and more people (especially technical people like frequent HN) should be pointing this out.
"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.
Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.
It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.
Highly recommend Zen Browser: https://github.com/zen-browser
its got stronger privacy out of the box than stock firefox, modern design, big fan of vertical tabs myself and it now has basic tab folders if enabled by flags. ubo/bpc both work nicely.
They really should be a LOT clearer about it on their homepage, 99.99% of "original" browsers tend to be a wrapper around Chromium.
And as someone who actually lived through the "IE is the standard, deal with it" - age, I refuse to use any Chromium based browser out of principle. We need more actually viable engines in use or Google will just keep dictating what's allowed on the internet by the fact that Chrome has something like 90% market share on desktop browsers.
I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked.
I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
NextDNS [0] has proven very useful for me on iOS. Firefox is 99% ad-free. Only for YouTube do I switch to Brave Browser.
I use Firefox on other devices and use the sync functionality so prefer to use it where possible.
My home router (Draytek) is also configured to force any connected devices to use NextDNS too.
Definitely worth the €20 annual subscription.
IIRC Firefox on iOS is basically a wrapper around Safari since it's not "opened up"?
Apparently no one remembers when Firefox changed their terms of service literally this year to become adversarial toward their own users.
Librewolf is the way to go now.
What does the binaries not being signed mean?
It seems waterfox (?) has a legal entity behind it for your exact reason!
No thanks. Their own devs have gladly called the project "very woke", and a "certainly quite political project".
Wow, a political free software project? Who could imagine such a thing.
Anyway sounds like you're trying to convince me to use it
> Wow, a political free software project? Who could imagine such a thing.
Can you imagine the outcry if they'd said the opposite...
You’ll find that has absolutely nothing to do with the way you choose to use the free software they produce for your benefit.
These days the term "woke" has lost almost all meaning. It used to mean being "awake" i.e. aware of socio-economic factors in society. Today, as far as I can tell, it simply refers to whatever the big corporations/alt-right doesn't like. Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism". To me them calling themselves "very woke" reads as "we are against anti-human behavior", which is a good thing.
> Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism"
To the left of oligarchy? I thought it was anything to the left of getting hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer that they labelled as communism? There must have been a massive leftward shift in society since I last checked the news!
I never had firefox pop up and tell me to attend a drag show or that I need to surf more diverse websites than my usual sports and news sites. how is it woke? I don't care what mozilla the org does. They jsut took a big revenue hit because of the decision against google, they won't have much money for any political endeavors other than maybe privacy and free speech on the web very soon
It crashes every few days for me and has since the last several major releases... enough that I can't rely on it anymore. (UG) Chromium has never crashed on me once.
Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration? I've heard some graphics drivers can be crashy when apps push the boundaries.
I have had crashes with Firefox in a long time.
It seems disingenuous to penalize a company for something that hasn't happened and is based on an assumption of interest.
In the same way we should chastise the platforms that choose to enshitify, we should praise those that hold out.
About a year ago FF said they had no current plans to remove V2 support, and if they did, they'd give at least 12 month notice. Which to me is basically language saying they absolutely will remove it at some point, otherwise they'd just say "no we'll never remove it, fuck google".
I've moved to LibreWolf personally
Did you look at the FAQ page they created afterwards?
'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
> In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
Correction, they said personal data, which if you go by the EU's definition means "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual".
Which wouldn't be "anonymous stats", and can you give an example of a jurisdiction where sharing "anonymous stats" would go under selling personal data?
And is "doesn't sell your data to advertisers" also too broad? Because they removed that part too.
If I’m not mistaken they own an advertisement company which they use the data for.
There's still a way to load it under Chrome 138, but when Chrome 139 lands, that's when MV2 will finally be removed.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
> Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule
In current chromium source, it seems still possible to force manifest v2 extensions with `kAllowLegacyMV2Extensions` feature flag?
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
This however is a good time to export any extension preferences, because once it's removed you won't be able to access them.
The plausible deniability reason is that Manifest V2 gave way too much power to extensions, which is true.
... except that we already execute remote JavaScript on our browsers constantly. And we do it, usually, unconsentually. Versus extensions, which are a deliberate thing you need to install.
That's what i find stupid of current browsers. When Firefox was first created by "stripping" all the bloat from Netscape navigator, the idea was that Extensions would allow end users to add optional functionality . It put the user in control of their browser experience.
There should be a browser that doesn't assume their users are stupid. I want to turn off CORS I want to be able to modify the DOM and inject whatever the heck I want.
Chrome launched in an era where IE didn't stop the gazillion pop ups and crashed pretty often losing dozens of windows, before tabbed browsing and with no restore. Firefox was a resource hog due to memory fragmentation.
Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.
Everyone was hyped when Chrome came out. This is hard to believe but the world was different 20 years ago
Seems everyone is releasing a browser nowadays. (Not literally, this is a figure of speech.)
Perhaps uBlock/uMatrix needs its own browser.
Mozilla is "all in" on surveillance advertising. From its press releases and strategic initiatives (for lack of a better term), it appears to believe online advertising is essential for the www to exist. Whereas, it has never stated that "ad blockers" are essential for the www to exist.
Yeah but it's always a fork of firefox or chrome. I have seen nothing to indicate they are not all in on surveillance advertising. They are looking into "anonymous group advertising" by interest, now can someday reverse engineer that and figure out that you like boutique spicy pickles? maybe? I have my doubts.
Not to defend chrome or chromium, there is a way for chrome users to use manifest v2 in version 138 and above. See the link below.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...
For me, I choose not to manually update my ungoogled chromium to version 138 and above.
FWIW, these instructions allow you to re-enable uBlock in Chrome 138. A temporary fix, but I needed a temporary fix so I could export my hundreds of custom filters (so I can load them into uBlock in Firefox).
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1itw1bz/end_o...
Among the neater features of the full-featured uBO is its ability to load userscripts from external sources.
While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.
Has anyone made the switch to firefox? I’d be sad to lose my nice google profile integration to chrome and the password manager. And whenever I try Firefox it feels a little bit jankier and slower, but that might just be in my head
I did, a few months ago when they disabled uBlock on my Chrome.
The experience has been a delight. It runs smoothly, I can customize it more than Chrome (compact mode being one example [1]), and with the official iCloud Passwords extension I get to use the same password manager I use on my iPhone.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Best part being, if I need something that Chrome provides and Firefox doesn’t, I can potentially implement it myself, and contribute to a proper open source project while I’m at it.
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...
I recommend Vaultwarden as a bitwarden server. It's pretty quick to set up and completely open source.
I gave Firefox a try for a month, but ran into enough issues that I ended up switching back to Chrome about a week ago. Here are some of the problems I encountered that I can recall at the moment and doesn't include the many issues I managed to fix:
Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.
Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.
The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.
Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.
Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.
Yes. Firefox has its own password manager and profile system. Once I copied the chrome settings to firefox, I closed chrome and rarely open it these days.
Ditto. I installed CrunchBang++ Linux[1] on a couple of out-of-support 4GB-RAM Chromebooks about 6 months ago, and they (with Firefox (w/shared account) and uBlock Origin) basically continue to fill the Chromebook role (my morning before-work lazy web-surfing guided by Inoreader) with aplomb: occasionally I go a little too tab-crazy (or open one too many YouTube tabs) and it freezes, but simply restarting (holding the power button down until it reboots) gets me going again. I save+close excess tabs to OneTab and life goes on. Extremely utilitarian.
You can export your passwords from chrome as a CSV and then import them into Firefox's password manager. Although, best would be using an external password manager that always keeps your passwords encrypted, like bitwarden. Remember to delete the file (shred even) and reboot so your passwords aren't hanging around in disk/memory. Same goes for bookmarks, although those are less sensitive.
Sure, years ago, and it's been great. I do keep Vivaldi around as a Chrome-variant for those sites that need it, and appreciate their general approach. However, Firefox has the things I need, e.g.:
- Various integrations, such as password managers. - uBlock Origin - Temporary containers - so even those sites that save cookies, are really saving them ephemerally until that container closes.
I've used Firefox for a few months now and it's generally fine, but noticeably slow and janky compared to Chrome. Several websites just didn't work right and required Chrome. The dev tools seem unreliable, with the network tab often failing to capture requests correctly.
I miss Chrome but won't go back without UBlock.
Hoping Kagi's Orion browser gets better.
It's a little bit slower, but I've been using Firefox on all my personal machines for ten years and finally switched my work web dev machine when Firefox introduced tab groups recently.
It's fine. My issues with it are few and far between. It's a little worse on android but small price to pay for ublock and dark reader imo
Nyxt Browser is about to bounce back hard (with Allah's blessing), after a major rewrite to use Electron. I wonder what this means for them...
I hear this and I also hear the lack of experience with enterprise (let alone commercial) software development.
Five lines of code still requires one dev, one PM, and one manager. It still requires security reviews, audits, and so on. There are no free lines of code in a commercial code base.
Librewolf works fine for me. Comes with uBlock Origin installed.
Same. I didn't even enable complete blocking just default one. I'm not too concerned about invisible trackers, I use meta products daily. Just the visible ads.
You might as well use uBlock Origin Lite. The point is that all of these options are less powerful because of the limitations of manifest v3. Instead of downgrading the effectiveness, they’ve opted to release a separate less powerful option so that it’s clear to the end user that it’s less effective than what was available with manifest v2.
adguard is a way to go. their app kills these ads perfectly
Try Waterfox (if not Firefox), and UBlock Origin Lite if staying on Chrome.
I moved to, and pay for, Vivaldi. I want to be the customer.
Strange, still enabled and working for me.
Chrome 138.0.7204.101 uBlock Origin 1.65.0
Zen browser is pretty minimal in terms of bloat carried from FF
Just use LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on Android.
They basically strip out all the anti-privacy, anti-user "features" from Firefox.
Yeah this report is a bit hard to believe, I have hundreds of tabs open in brave constantly and they have a native tab suspend/hibernate that works great for tabs you haven’t accessed in a while. And my favorite small feature ‘force paste’ for all those inputs with janky paste blocking “security” features
No worries! We'd only ever be discussing this if governments hadn't provided a way to access their services, most of which are only available on the internet.
Can you imagine just how stupid it would be for governments not to provide another software for accessing it? If they didn't provide something, internet giants would be able to dictate their only means to communicate with citizens. Influence elections. Even lock out governments from their own countries. How moronic would a government need to be to risk that happening? Plus it would be unrealistically cruel as well, because it would of course deny access to the poor.
So no worries. Governments care about people. That's what they keep saying. So they have surely prevented something like this from happening, or provide an alternative.
Right?
I’m excited to see what Ladybird becomes, but it’s not exactly ready to be a daily driver.
Ladybird doesn't support ublock origin either, nor does it even allow for ad blockers extentions like Chrome still does.
Moved to firefox and I am glad I did, I want to use a browser that respects my privacy choices