Yeah, we saw this coming. When Manifest v3 first talked about.
Google an ad company are killing ad blockers. Yeah, that sounds right.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
4 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
72582 readers
4135 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
MV3 doesn't kill ad blockers. uBOL (uBlock Origin Lite) blocks ads, is by the same author and uses MV3. The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Some of these "features" that classic uBO used are available in MV3 but requires different permissions. Some of them could also be implemented with native messaging. The main uBO author though feels slighted by Google and went on a trash talking campaign against Google, and to be fair had a few good points. Anyway, most people on social media now care more about how Chromium and Firefox makes them feel now irregardless of facts. They think their emotions somehow are the same as facts.
From my understanding, MV3 kills vital features of ad-blockers in that
- Some filtering rules do rely on the ability to read the content of the webpage, which can't be migrated, per the FAQ linked in the article
- The declarative API means an update to the rules requires an update to the plugin itself, which might get delayed by the reviewing process, causing the blocker to lag behind the tracker. It might not be able to recover as quickly as uBO in the recent YouTube catch-up round.
-
uBOL GitHub does a pretty good job of explaining some challenges, and some of them are better tracked in the issues.
-
Your second point isn't accurate though and MV3 does support dynamic rules.
The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.
Then allow a savvy user to choose to keep MV2 mode via an opt-in control instead of depreciating years of hard work by non-malicious extension authors. uBlock Origin is, in fact, the ONLY browser extension I use in Chrome, as Firefox is my main browser.
I agree they should have tried to find more ways to keep the old behavior. MV3 rollout has already been delayed for a long time, and now users merely get a message. I'm not sure that the community (mostly Google contributors) won't give in or try to find a way to keep MV2. However, what was done with MV2 can now be done with MV3 with native messaging or other network tools... I think the concern is that allowing an exception makes it much easier for a malicious extension or software to get users to agree not realizing what they're agreeing to. Furthermore, the declarative approach is actually preferable by many. You get most of the same features without exposing all your traffic to an extension.
And yet the likelihood of Google publishing a malicious extension is quite low. Not sure why you're so adamant about defending their shitty anti-adblock actions, making excuses for a mega corporation.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, Arch Linux, NixOS, Flathub, etc. all end up publishing malicious software in their stores and package managers. It is inevitable. If you're not worried about sandboxing then you might as well proxy all your traffic using third party software.
Firefox my beloved.
Saying this about any corporation's product is guaranteed not to age well.
load more comments
(12 replies)
load more comments
(14 replies)
Google needs to be ended.
When people say things like this, I wonder if they understand how impossible it is. Google is not just a company. It is a 2 trillion dollar entity. Even if Google search entirely fails, it will still persist. At this point, you may as well say, "The wind needs to be ended." You don't end the wind. The wind already won. It will outlive you, me, and our children.
What we can do is protect against it. We can deal with it. We can contain it. We can redirect it and repurpose it to be helpful. But ending it? That doesn't happen.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Gee, what a shame. Good think I switched to FireFox. Hey, does anyone know how to make chat work on FireFox?
load more comments
(1 replies)
Bring back Internet Explorer.
That's one way to say that you like the smell of lead-based gasoline.
I'll just side load it. Fuck you Google
Very firefox, very legal very cool.
I'm not worried about this at all. I don't use Chrome anyways. I use Brave. It has a built-in ad blocker that works pretty well and I don't see that going away.