https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369820
Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024
The "Manifest V3" rollout is back after letting tensions cool for a year.
Chrome's new adblock-limiting extension plan is still on. The company paused the rollout of the new "Manifest V3" extension format a year ago after an outcry over how much it would damage some of Chrome's most popular extensions. 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. On that date (we'll be on "Chrome 127" by then), Google will turn off Manifest V2 for the pre-stable versions of Chrome—that's the Beta, Dev, and Canary channels. Google says, "Manifest V2 extensions [will be] automatically disabled in their browser and will no longer be able to install Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store."
The timeline around a stable channel rollout is worded kind of strangely. 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. The exact timing may vary depending on the data collected, and during this time, we will keep you informed about our progress." It's unclear what "data" Google is concerned with. It's not the end of the world if an extension crashes—it turns off and stops working until the user reboots the extension. Maybe the company is concerned about how many people Google "Firefox" once their ad-blocker stops working.
Enterprise users with the "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" policy turned on will get an extra year of Manifest V2 compatibility.
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. With more limited tools, you'll be more exposed to the rest of the Internet, though, and a big part of the privacy-invasive Internet is Google. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called Google's description of Manifest V3 "Deceitful and Threatening" and said that it's "doubtful Mv3 will do much for security."
Firefox's Add-On Operations Manager also didn't agree with any claims of privacy benefits, saying that, while malicious add-ons "are mostly interested in grabbing bad data, they can still do that with the current webRequest API." In a later article, the EFF also points out that Google's "lighter on resources" argument also doesn't really hold water. Anyone can open the Chrome Task Manager and see that a single website can take up a huge amount of memory, often in the 200MB-plus range. 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. Something like uBlock Origin, across all your tabs, is in the 80MB range.
The one part of Manifest V3 that everyone can agree on is that it will hurt ad blockers. 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!). Google originally went with a completely crippling limit of 5,000 "dynamic" rules, and after the widespread outrage during its first attempt to push Manifest V3, the company upgraded filtering to a "more generous" limit of 30,000 rules. uBlock Origin comes with about 300,000-plus filtering rules you can enable, and you can also import additional blocking lists and have that number skyrocket.
As far as we can tell, there's no justification for arbitrarily limiting the list of filter rules. Manifest V2 does not have a limit and works great. Firefox is also implementing Manifest V3—it basically has to because Chrome is so much more popular—but it's doing so without limits to filtering and other capabilities. 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."
Once Manifest V3 happens, Chrome users will be limited to "uBlock Origin Lite," while users will need to switch to Firefox or some other non-limited browser to get the full extension. An FAQ on the project details just how many feature regressions there will be—in addition to the hard limits on filtering rule sets, there are a host of other limits on filtering now. Items can't be filtered based on the response headers or according to the URL in the address bar. Developers are more limited in what regular expressions they can use, along with a host of other technical limitations.
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I don't give a shit about Google's ad revenue and will continue to take whatever I want for free.
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This is the maximally based position to take.
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they're already selling my data to China and the Pentagon, wtf do they need ad money for?
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Can we all agree that DW fricking deserved it and that Arthur's parents and friends basically abused him by acting like he was a horrible person despite knowing DW is a little c*nt?
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the whole show was horrible and i refused to let my anklebiters watch it, ever
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The only Google service that isn't 100% replaceable is Google Maps, and that's because of the municipal APIs Google plugs into. Otherwise OSM is just as good. Everyone of their other services has degredated past the point of their competitors.
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Normal people don't care about this nor do they have the time or energy to find and learn to use and sign up for or install 84838282 technically superior alternatives
Google runs the world
Thems the breaks
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Normies can (and will) watch the ads, then
chads stay winning.
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Most people don't use Adblock
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Most people are ugly and unfrickable. What's your point?
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My point is nothing changes except for the fraction of a percentage of people who meet all three of the following requirements:
1. Use Adblock
2. Are technologically cognizant enough to be aware of this change
3. Despite #2, still use Chrome as their browser
This is a vanishingly small number of people and their collective seethe is irrelevant to Alphabet.
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True, but 99.9% of the people fitting all three of those criteria are the kind who will sneed here, and on the orange site, and shit up the Chromium bug tracker and insist they can never use Firefox because one time Mozilla gave $50 to some woke cause.
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idk I've already had to help a handful of old people update their adblock on chrome because they didn't want to deal with youtube ads, even technologically illiterate boomers are mostly aware of adblock these days
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Thank frick I'm not normal
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into the cuck shed with you
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It takes 15 seconds on a modern internet connection to solve this problem permanently by installing another browser. If any r-slurs need help with this, let me know and I can help @ $90/hr with a 1hr minimum
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I'll do it for $89.50
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I'll do it for $200, my price matches the increased quality of service.
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wow, you must be really good!
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I'll sponsor and recommend your product for 50 dollars
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People know how ofc, most impacted are change averse normies who are used to clicking on the chrome icon on their phones and don't want to use something that 'feels weird'
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those are the same people who never downloaded an adblock in the first place(unless someone else downloaded it for them)
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I'll do it with just a 20 minute minimum (minor price bump to $300/hour).
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As I discovered at work, it's really no effort to use Firefox instead of Chrome. You can even auto-imports your Chrome history and bookmarks etc.
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Chrome was vastly superior to Internet Explorer way back when but in this day and age there's dozens of awesome web browsers that are as feature rich as chrome.
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They're literally all Chrome though under the surface. Firefox is the only other major browser that uses it's own tech.
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Which is a shame, because Mozilla is just not pulling its weight. It even needs Google to bankroll them.
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The technology itself is fine but indeed they're kind of fricked when it comes to making money.
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Is Edge really even worse the Chrome nowadays? I am not a computercel so I am genuinely curious lol.
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No. Edge runs on the exact same code as chrome.
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Edge is virus that links you to other viruses whenever you search for anything.
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I don't mind edge I use it a lot at work. It integrates with all the res of the office suite like your emails and your teams drives. Performance is good and the layout isn't bad. Mostly I use Brave tho.
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The only pain in the butt is having to do a new noscript white-list.
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Firefox is a bit of a pain on first startup, because you must disable pocket, telemetry, DNS over HTTPS, that weird keyboard media controls feature that doesn't work, and remove pocket from the extensions bar on the top right.
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I'm so happy in the Congolalilulelo 5mo ago #5439284 Edited None spent 0 currency on pingsWhy disable DNS over https?
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Because then you're sending all your DNS queries to Firefox/Mozilla and you might as well just tell theme every website you visit. It's fine to use is you use a service you trust, just use something unrelated to Firefox.
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!codecels how big of a problem will this be? Do you think there will be easy workarounds? Or do I need to dust off the old pihole?
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The workaround is called “stop using chrome”. Seriously. If they do this it'll be enough to get me off my butt and switching to brave or Firefox or something
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are you kidding me do this now
ff developer is fricking lit
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Yeah I know but I am a creature of habit. IDK what Adblock support looks like on Edge but I have been pretty impressed with how speedy it is
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EDGE
who even are you
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It's fast bro
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How much of this functionality do other browsers use? It's enough to impact other chromium based browsers?
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Oh this is true 🤔
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Give them a few years and the maintenance burden will be too much of a headache for them
Even FF isn't safe, they have a history of following chromes stupid decisions, probably due to their conflict of interest
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Using Vivaldi browser for years. I think it's nice
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This lol.
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given chromiums marketshare as an upstream dependency is trending north of 80%, huge. google practically owns chromium and its such a fricking massive project that forking it without capital to devote to maintaining it and marketing it is futile. also, piholes ans similar will likely start dying off in the next decade if mv3 goes through because its likely that google and co will develop more "features" that depend on network connectivity to ensure ad delivery and execution, meaning shit will just stop working at all unless every network request is unmolested.
how we as a species allowed an advertising company to get such a stranglehold over the internet is sad.
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Just move to Firefox and it's not a problem.
The only reason we used chrome in the first place was because it was fast and allowed ad blockers like firefox.
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I think at least amongst the nerd space people started to use Chrome because it was new and shiny and initially had a superior javascript engine. Then Firefox caught up again but people were already stuck in their ways.
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It was really fast when it first came out, I dug up the old reddit thread about it https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z9op/chrome_is_here?sort=controversial.
Really makes me miss the old google, back when they still had 20% time and "don't be evil"
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it's not a problem if you don't use a shitty browser
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Can't believe some r-slurs have fricking browser loyalty like omg as soon as one becomes crap you use another one. It's not like learning a whole new software ecosystem, it's a web browser.
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I'm all for letting Google kill Chrome all by themselves
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not my problem, i use librewolf
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Bravechads aren't affected because their adblock is built-in instead of reliant on extensions.
Firefox is aight but still doesn't offer the same level of adblock protection.
Firefoxcels can cope and make up lies about Brave's supposed cryptominers all they want but the fact is Brave makes their own money through their services while Firefox is mostly funded by Google.
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Firefox chads we stay winning.
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If the normies start using it then I'll have to switch to something else
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Google chrome and Google. com can suck a giant molten peepee
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you know I'm right
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shut the frick up you stupid skanks. Google literally gives hundreds of millions in funding to mozilla every year, all it will take is one letter stating "comply or you lose the funding."
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so ... where's the letter?
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FF is open-source. If they do shit like that you can just use water-fox or the billion other forks which are just "Firefox without Mozilla"
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I actually do have waterfox as a "backup"
Slow start up time tho
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so is chromium desu
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is there any real reason to run a current version of chrome? it's not like it's a security update.
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if they kill adblocks I will use firefox, really that simple
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I'm so happy in the Congo5mo ago #5439282 Edited None spent 0 currency on pingsI was thinking that maybe it's slightly bad to give an ad company a near monopoly on the browser market.
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dont use chrome simple as
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Manifest V3 will finally destroy adblockers for good December 2035
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there's a reason this is happening: adblockers at the deepest level use the same permissions people give to malware & data stealing extensions
this needs to happen
AdGuard already got around it
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Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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You're not a femboy, you're a sissy slut with a god complex, go back to your dildos and your fantasies you fat frick, and leave me alone.
Snapshots:
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369820:
ghostarchive.org
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archive.ph (click to archive)
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/180r227/google_chrome_will_limit_ad_blockers_starting?sort=controversial:
undelete.pullpush.io
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://old.reddit.com/r/technews/comments/180zrvc/google_chrome_will_limit_ad_blockers_starting?sort=controversial:
undelete.pullpush.io
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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