Many people seem to treat it synonymously with "no more procedural request blocking", but that's not a thing Mozilla ever did:
> For Manifest V3 extensions, Chrome no longer supports the "webRequestBlocking" permission (except for policy-installed extensions). Instead, the "webRequest" and "webRequestAuthProvider" permissions enable you to supply credentials asynchronously. Firefox continues to support "webRequestBlocking" in Manifest V3 and provides "webRequestAuthProvider" to offer cross-browser compatibility.
The permission model also seems much more reasonable (less permissions have to be requested upfront at install time) than MV2, so I actually hope Firefox does deprecate it at some point.
Just as one example: Chrome + uBOL on Reddit will show you plenty of "Sponsored" stuff. You can use Inspector to find the offending CSS classes and then use `display: none` on them with something like Stylus[0], but not everybody wants to play that whack-a-mole game on the many sites that push uBOL past its blocking capabilities.
The point is that it supports everything that currently matters in any substantial way.
Lots of people have been pointing out that ad companies will figure ways out around it. But they really haven't been.
MV3 and UBOL have been in wide usage for about a year and a half now. And nothing has been changing. Adblocking continues to be great.
The fact of the matter is, the ad block lists were getting so large and the JavaScript functionality was slow and it was significantly impacting page load times. UBOL uses vastly more efficient compiled code that is part of the browser and is just a far better ad blocking experience altogether.
But I guess that just doesn't fit the narrative that people want to believe, where MV3 was part of a big evil plan.
the narrative that google, largest ad company proposed MV3 which limits current functionality of UBO so that UBO Lite can be implemented? Yeah, such a narrative... It's clear google is our buddy here who will never squeeze and exploit any option to push more intrusive and targeted ads and we should totally trust it
It most definitely is as well. In fact it's better because you don't have the slower page loading times anymore.
And everyone I know who used UBO and switched to UBOL has had no complaints about ads not being blocked.
Whereas people who don't actually use it love to continue to insist that it's this degraded experience that doesn't work as well. And usually when one of them comes up with an example of some ad not being blocked, it turns out because they hadn't configured UBOL to use complete blocking mode.
Everyone who you know is irrelevant. I've tested and see that ads pass through, and tracking passes through with uBo light on Chrome. I can see it in the browser trace, and I can see it in DNS logs.
Look I'm not an expert in web browsers, but I defer to those extension authors who definitely are. There's some reason uBO doesn't work well in MV3 even though they tried. Whatever technical explanation there is for why MV3 is fine, there's some caveat not mentioned.
I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.
Brave still allows you to install uBlock & some other extensions that should technically not be supported under MV3, but they still ship it with support for those.
Just heard about Helium browser, which is just dechromium + uBlock and it's still beta.
Helium still supports MV2, because the upstream hasn't removed related code. They basically turn on/off some macros to enable MV2 again. And this won't last long for sure.
> I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.
My last hope is ladybird right now, I don't use Firefox or Chrome as my main browsers anymore, and use them only within temporary sandboxes. Without history, without cookies, without logins for the most part.
For the most part, it doesn't. It's not a consumer ready browser, but a pretty nice little rendering engine. If you use ladybird as bindings, it's a bit unstable right now because they are refactoring a lot of parts in the codebase.
I built my own tools on top of it, mostly to use internet websites and selfhosted kiwix archives with my local agentic env.
I guess what I am saying is that I don't have a primary browser anymore. Not a browser where I just can trust it that it doesn't do shit with my data. Being able to selfhost kiwix is a superb internet experience if you build your own search dashboard for it, I can fully recommend it.
Have to merge my things upstream with ZIMdex when I have the time (probably around June).
It seems to me that --unless you really, strictly compartimentalize your browser usage--, using multiple browsers will only supply your data to more parties.
It may look like it works "just as well" but that's not true. There are numerous things that impact performance and effectiveness that are not possible with chromium-based browsers, or at least have to be done inefficiently, including
what's the diff between lite and full? i dont even remember what i use on safari, wipr or something. mostly use firefox but sometimes i casually just let things launch in safari
Why do people say crap like this... Safari was the first browser to completely remove mv2. From all the major browsers Safari has the worse adblocking experience and support for adblocking extensions...
1. Third-party cookie blocking by default — 2003 (Safari 1.0); industry first.
2. Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), using on-device machine learning to identify and limit cross-site trackers — 2017; industry first.
3. Storage Access API prompts for embedded third-party content (e.g., social login widgets) — 2018 (ITP 2.0); industry first (co-developed by WebKit, later adopted as a web standard).
4. Full third-party cookie blocking (no exceptions) — 2020 (ITP in Safari 13.1); industry first for a major browser.
Apple only does things to progress their own business model. Apple failed at becoming an ad business so they pivoted to subscriptions and app revenue. Now they are building an ad business. Just look at their ad revenue.
Many people seem to treat it synonymously with "no more procedural request blocking", but that's not a thing Mozilla ever did:
> For Manifest V3 extensions, Chrome no longer supports the "webRequestBlocking" permission (except for policy-installed extensions). Instead, the "webRequest" and "webRequestAuthProvider" permissions enable you to supply credentials asynchronously. Firefox continues to support "webRequestBlocking" in Manifest V3 and provides "webRequestAuthProvider" to offer cross-browser compatibility.
The permission model also seems much more reasonable (less permissions have to be requested upfront at install time) than MV2, so I actually hope Firefox does deprecate it at some point.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-manifest-v3-adbl...