Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024

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.

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The second being Safari, right?

Right?

…right…

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- 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.
  
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- Firefox gang rise up!
  
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- Why would it be? Maybe if you looked at market share just for mobile devices. But on desktop it’s limited to just macOS.
  
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Remember, Firefox is great and has no dependency on upstream Google code.

Use Firefox.

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Preaching to the wrong crowd there buddy, you want to be convincing the exact type of person who isn't on Lemmy

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- 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
  
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The one and only, my beloved 🔥🦊

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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.

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- ? I'm quite positive I've used MIDI in Firefox on hooktheory.
  
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- 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.
  
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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.

https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adblocking.html

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You have a choice A. Dump Chrome and chromium based browsers. or B. remain a whiny loser who has to deal with ads.

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Firefox has been fantastic for me.

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- Even without all this ad blocker bs from Google, I like Firefox a lot better than the chrome based browser I used before, opera.
  
  It's a lot cleaner and feels faster
  
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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.

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As someone who never switched to chrome in the first place, it's fun to watch all the smoke and fire now.

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- Mozilla was quite the memory hog, back in the day. In some respects, it still is, but it's certainly better than this Manifest v3 crap.
  
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Same. As I'm seeing what's happening with Google, im glad I made that choice

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Firefox is just the only decent option. And while at it, use Piped or Invidious while you still can, people!

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I tried using Invidious, but found that it misses quite a lot of new posts in my subscriptions. So in the end I _ahem flew 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.

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- 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.
  
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- Newpipe is damn near perfect. No ads either.
  
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I'd recommend archiving all of the channels you can from Youtube, it's clear they don't want our traffic at all.

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- 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.
  
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Mozilla is implementing Manifest V3. They plan to implement it slightly different than Chrome: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-firefox-recap-next-steps/

They have published a guide for extension developers: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest-v3-migration-guide/

More background on Manifest V3:

https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2019/07/googles-plans-chrome-extensions-wont-really-help-security

https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2021/11/manifest-v3-open-web-politics-sheeps-clothing

https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening

https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation

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Relevant part from the blog post:

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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i wish mozilla would just drop webextensions and webmanifest. webextensions are terrible. :/

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friends dont let friends use google chrome

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15

for those who haven't switched to firefox, might i recommend:

https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher - which adds a chrome like profile switcher to your firefox toolbars

and

https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox - which changes the look of firefox to chrome's new 2023 material design refresh

edit: sorry! see the reply below i had the wrong repo for the updated materialfox. it's actually: https://github.com/edelvarden/material-fox-updated

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MaterialFox hasn't been updated in a very long time, unless you're talking about a fork and just copied the wrong link?

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- sorry!
  
  i remembered it was a fork that i saw which had the material refresh and i went back and sure enough it was further down in my starred repositories!
  
  the correct link is: https://github.com/edelvarden/material-fox-updated
  
  for reference i found it through: https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/17a9a6l/implemented_chrome_refresh_2023_redesign_in/
  
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How does this compare to using FF containers? Separate bookmarks or something along those lines?

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- it just basically uses different profiles with -no-remote to open two completely different instances with their own bookmarks, history, etc.
  
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Enterprise users with the "ExtensionManifestV2Availability" policy turned on will get an extra year of Manifest V2 compatibility.

Who are these enterprise users 🤨 🤔...

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Any way of migrating chrome passwords to other password managers? And any good free password managers? That's what's keeping me from switching

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Bitwarden has a great free tier, it’s open source, and cross platform. I highly recommend it!

https://bitwarden.com/help/import-from-chrome/

If you want something that’s not cloud focused, check out KeepassXC too!

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- Another vote for bitwarden, mobile apps are great as well. If you are so inclined, it can be self-hosted if you want to retain full control
  
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In chrome, you can export the passwords to a CSV file. You can then use the CSV file to import the passwords into Firefox or a password manager.

Here are the instructions for bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com/help/import-from-chrome/

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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

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."

Saved 72% of original text.

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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.

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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.

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- 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.
  
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AdGuard (system wide), PiHole, inbuilt adblockers are still there and won't be affected by this. Who cares.

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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.

🤷

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- 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.
  
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- 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.
  
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They decided to commit suicide?

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That maneuver will cost them a few % market share at best. Most people don't even use ad blockers at all

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- 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.
  
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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.

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- 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
  
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