- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
the company said it would start turning off Manifest V2 extensions
…in time for Black Friday & the holiday sales?
I have always used Firefox on all my devices, except for one: the Chromebook I was forced to buy because of compatibility with my college’s test proctoring spyware.
On that device, not only did uBlock Origin quit working the other day, but today Chrome even kept disabling uBlock Lite with the error message that “This extension reloaded itself too frequently”. It could be some kind of legitimate bug, but it sure feels a lot like foul play on Google’s part.
Stopped using that garbage browser a couple of weeks ago. Hardened Firefox ftw. Just using stock Firefox isn’t enough if you’re concerned about your privacy on the internet btw. If all you’re looking for is an ad free experience tho, then stock Firefox should be enough.
LibreWolf is great btw, if you’re to lazy to manually harden Firefox. It also comes with uBlock Origin pre-installed. Also check out their community: [email protected]
Yeah, I know.
Firefox’s future isn’t looking good with all that layoffs and lost money. I am very scared that it might go the way of Opera, and then we will trully have nothing left.
There’s a crucial difference:
Firefox is open source, Opera isn’t.
Librefox, Tor, Mullvad browser… etc. I can never have nothing left.
All of those are still standing on Firefox’s shoulders and the actual rendering engine on the browser isn’t really trivial thing to build. Sure, they’re not going away, and likely Firefox will be around too for quite a while, but the world wide web as we currently know it is changing and Google and Microsoft are few of the bigger players pushing the change.
If you’re old enough you’ll remember the banners ‘Best viewed with <this browser> on <that resolution>’, and it’s not too far off from the future we’ll have if the big players get their wishes. Things like google suite, whatever meta is offering and pretty much “the internet” as your Joe Average understands it wants to implement technology where it’s not possible to block ads or modify the content you’re shown in any other way. It’s not too far off from your online banking and other very much real life affecting services start to have boundaries in place where they require certain level of ‘security’ from your browser and you can bet that things which allow content modifying things, like adblocker, doesn’t qualify for the new standards.
On many places it’s already illegal to modify or tamper DRM protected content in any ways (does anyone remember libdvdcss?) and the plan is to include similar (more or less) restrictions to the whole world wide web, which would say that we’ll have things like fediverse who allow browsers like firefox and ‘the rest’ like banking, flight/ticket/hotel/whatever booking sites, big news outlets and so on who only allow the ‘secure’ version of the browser. And that of course has very little to do with actual security, they just want control over your device and what content is fed to you, regardless if you like it or not.
Those are made on Firefox engine. That is made and maintained by the company Mozilla. Which is experiencing those problems.
It’s like those people who say that they don’t use chrome because it’s shit and breaks privacy, they use edge and brave.Firefox is a fully open source browser. Whether or not it fails and goes down doesn’t really matter, as its source code is out there for anyone to use, and build a browser off of it.
It kinda does matter. It’s an enormously complicated project, and it’s possible that nobody will be able to be an ultimate fork if needed.
I’ve been dual welding browsers since chrome came out. The second they started talking about deprecating manifest 2, I test drove Vivaldi and Brave. Now they’re set up as my second.
I tried to convert over to Libwolf, But it absolutely massacres my passkeys.
I plan to main Firefox until they do something stupid which I think is inevitable with their recent statements.
I’m just hoping that by the time The other Firefox shoe drops there will be something else viable on the market. I don’t know how long Brave and Vivaldi can hold out with chromium changing underneath them
Oof I was considering LW but now am worried about the passkeys. Was that from an import or a remove and recreate?
Been meaning to try Zen but maybe I should test more before trying either
I wouldn’t trust Brave as it has a poor track record for privacy and is often used as a crypto miner behind the scenes.
That’s a fairly long time ago now and the crypto token crap is off by default. As far as I know they are the only browser with a paid development team that is trying to combat YouTube ads. And they’re blocking technique is unique amongst the options we have. If it comes down to using Brave for YouTube, I have no problem with doing that.
The only thing stopping me moving to Brave is the awful bookmark sync implementation… when I used it for a small period in the past it was keeping some I’d long deleted on other devices etc
I also would prefer it to implement bookmark separators (like both Vivaldi and FF do) but I can live without those if they sorted out the sync.
Vivaldi, run by the old opera team, has their own adblock built into the app itself
Yup. I always get shat on for mentioning that the crypto crap is off by default. I quite like the idea behind it, have the browser send you ads and then allow you to choose what to do with the earnings but in practice it doesn’t work so well sadly
Yeah, sadly, bringing Brave into any browser conversation is like saying, “Please take a dump on my face.” And I get some of the vitriol. Brave would likely sell you down the river for $7 if they thought they could get away with it, but so would two-thirds of the browsers out there. Even Firefox, the last true holdout at the moment, is hungry. I hope they find a rev stream before they do something drastic.
I like the concept of letting you choose the ads you see and earning some of the compensation. But it needs to happen at the advertiser level. I’d like a world where I pay a little to the browser, a little to the originator, and maybe get a small pool to dedicate to a site or cause I want to patronize.
It’s totally ok. I’ve phased Chrome out in the beginning of the year already.
And my phaseout of Chrome is complete. My two browsers are now Firefox and Edge. Bit surprised at the latter tbh but it seems reasonably adequate as a secondary browser.
Yup same here Firefox for personal use and Edge for work since it deals better with all the MS sites
My understanding is that Edge is Chromium and will also eventually be impacted by this.
Opera is also Chromium but they said they are not going to do what Chrome is. So there must still be some flexibility.
Fingers crossed.
Edge isn’t really better in any way. It’s both Google and Microsoft, like the marriage of awful
Chrome is the abblock-block? You might have outblocked me today, but I’ll firefox you away!
🎶 I want to see your adblock-block-block
🎶 Your adblock-block
I feel like I have seen this news since forever, I am happily living my life with Firefox… Although the android mobile really needs some love.
Oh man. Once Firefox on Android got extension support, I hopped on that train so hard. No ads on mobile browser? Heck yeah.
It has extensions support for like 6 years at this point. Unless you got some extreme obscure extensions
Huh. I was under the impression that proper extension support (eg ublock origin) only came about recently?
You are correct in the proper extension support part. Until recently FF Android only supported a handful of selected addons made specifically for it.
uBlock Origin however has been one of those for almost a decade now.
I’m sorry you have been suffering ads all this time.Been working for a lomg time now.
Well, if my memory serves well, Ublock Origin has been in Firefox mobile for a long time already but I get you.
Although even before I did the switch I rarely saw ads on Google because I have always used DNS ad blocking (whether using my pi-hole or AdAway root version) but yeah Ublock Origin is just so much better.
One thing I would like is to selectively enable extensions in the “custom tab” modal for Firefox.
When I open an article, and it’s riddled with js and auto play video, I have to hit “Open in Firefox” to get uBlock to engage.
It would be nice to have the reader mode button in this view as well.
If it helps, you can dig into Androids settings and use Firefox for the default in-app browser for most apps. That’s what I did, anyway, and it’s been fantastic.
i like it, tbh I barely use the phone. I need more RAM on it for it to be more useful. It’s crazy that even 8GB is not good enough. Dam Samsung bloat. I wish I had a stylus option for Google pixel or something that can take a privacy respecting OS.
The Samsung bloat is real. I have two identical Galaxy Tabs, one with Lineage and one stock, and the software on the stock one is so annoying to go back to after using the Lineage one.
Eh, Firefox on Android works pretty well for me (I actually use Mull). There are a handful of websites that have issues, but many of them also have issues on Vanadium (Chromium on GrapheneOS), so I just use my desktop for those.
What issues are you running into?
What issues are you running into?
Tab management is plain bad, and the UI doesn’t feel snappy as, let’s say, Cromite or Chrome.
All those are paid off because of the extension ability in Firefox.
Really? Tab management seems largely equivalent to Chrome, and the UI feels totally fine to me. Are you on an older device perhaps? It’s a bit slow on my old phone (4 years old), but my new one (Pixel 8) is absolutely fine.
Nah, my device is not high end, but it ships with a SD 865, and 6 GB of RAM.
Have you used Chrome recently? It is just a better experience with Android, except because of the ads and shitty Google’s hand lol.
It feels so good to have your grouped tabs always accessible at the bottom and you can quickly switch just by tapping the little icon.
I’ve used Vanadium (GrapheneOS build of Chrome), which is fine. And I didn’t know about that tab grouping feature, that’s pretty nice! I tend to only have a few tabs open though, so I just swipe on the URL bar to jump between them, which works acceptably well.
Yeah, many of us hoard a lot of tabs, for the better for worse, but even after some simple web searches you can gather a lot of links quickly, so it is always handy to have a good tab management.
Switch to firefox.
Just wait, there will be “features” that are mandatory on most sites, only supported in chrome.
I’ve dropped websites over less.
then I won’t be visiting those sites I guess
I usually use a useragent switcher to bypass.
But the teams website for example opens a Microsoft specific browser api so its annoyingly locked to Edge specifically on mobile.
So download a user agent switcher and set it to show you as using chrome. This is what i do with firefox and i haven’t run across a site that thinks i’m using firefox.
Welcome all you shiny new Firefox users. Get a cup of a hot beverage and enjoy your freedom.
I’m glad I don’t use that piece of shit.
Firefox or nothing.
Been using Firefox for as long as I can remember now. Never had a reason to switch away, and I’m feeling rather vindicated.
There was a period some years ago where Firefox and Chrome were leapfrogging each other: Firefox would get slow and crap so I’d switch, then Chrome would get slow and crap and I’d switch back to FF, and so on. I’ve been on Chrome for quite a while it seems, until this development with uBO, well for me the internet is unusable without a shitblocker, so that’s the end of Chrome. Thankfully FF is up to the job.
I switched to Chrome probably a decade ago, because at the time it was significantly faster. I switched to chromium at some point and ended up back on Firefox when Google’s password manager stopped working on every browser except Chrome. Firefox is noticeably faster these days and doesn’t crash as often.
I don’t understand why all these chrome derivatives and firefox don’t just band together and extend manifest v3 with some vendored standardised extension that addresses the limitations.
Browsers do that for CSS and JavaScript features already. An extension could just check if the browser supports the “unlimited filters” option and use it if its available.
I have never researched it but heard that the permissions of manifest v3 are much better for privacy.
I am in favor of removing manifest v2 if the vendored extension becomes a reality.
Browsers already have too much complexity, lines of code and feature creep.
Firefox implements v3 without the restrictions.
From what I understand, the limit on the lists is not the only problem with it - my main concerns are a) lists only being able to update together with the extension itself and b) some features apparently being fundamentally disallowed, like the element picker I am dependent on.
Chrome only exists to download Firefox.
Just like how Micro$oft Windows is advertsiting Linux, Google Chrome advertsites Firefox!
LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX
Tell that to the unwashed masses.
winget install firefox
No chrome (or edge) needed
You mean ’apt’.
Fun fact,
apt
apparently is an alias tozypper
on my openSUSE Leap system.you mean
{...}: { programs.firefox.enable = true; }
Your package manager of choice :)
‘Yum’ could work too.
Sad saga, but here we are. I remember when Chrome was new and brought much needed speed and low resource usage to the browsing experience of the day. I even got email from a Chrome engineer once about a bug I mentioned in a forum, asking me for more information.
Google was already an ad company by then so anyone could have looked forward to this inevitability. Some did. Most of us did not.
Chrome has just always been there for some younger people but it will now live in my memory as a fully encapsulated end-to-end enshittification experience that I really should have always expected.
And just like it used to be with Internet Explorer, I am forced to use Chrome at work all day because thats the IT & security approved / enterprise-managed browser.
I, too, switched to Chrome around when they launched due to drastically better performance. But shortly after (a couple years?), I found out Opera had similar performance and had cool other features, so I switched to that. Opera then converted to a Chrome-clone, so I switched to Firefox, which had largely caught up w/ performance by that time.
If you have the option, request that Firefox be added to the supported app list or whatever by your IT team. Tell them you need some Firefox-specific extensions or something for your job.
I don’t really care what’s installed on my work computer, which I use solely for work purposes. Should I?
You’re the one using it, so I should think so…
Microsoft Edge: “Thank you, Chrome, for sharing the load.”
Imagine having an OS that doesn’t come with a proper package manager (and Firefox installed by default, for that matter).
Google Chrome’s
uBlock Originphaseout has begun