11 ms·

I approve (of both the release and the name). I see plenty of folks in here lamenting this release at all - in the hopes that the lack of it will push folks to

I approve (of both the release and the name). I see plenty of folks in here lamenting this release at all - in the hopes that the lack of it will push folks to Firefox. It won't. Those who care about this are already on Firefox, and frankly - Firefox isn't going to be the answer here (to be clear, this is opinion). I'm also not thrilled at manifest v3, although for very different reasons than the adblocking limitations - I do lots of extension development, and I think the service worker approach taken is a bad mistake, forcing a distributed consensus model onto extensions without understanding the limitations that model imposes given how often extensions span multiple js contexts (across tabs/frames/content_scripts/windows/etc). Frankly - the environment is also still riddled with bugs... everything from docs that are wrong, to serious issues like a service worker not activating on simple, basic, required events (like chrome.action.onClicked, which is literally about as basic as it gets for extensions). Overall - my first impression of the manifest v3 upgrade was fairly neutral (it's not really solving any of my pain points, and it requires a lot of changes to support - but it seemed functional). My opinion after porting several large extension projects to the space is... bad. It's a bad set of changes as implemented in chromium right now.

clumsysmurf 4y ago
> I do lots of extension development Off topic, but since you seem experienced at this, do you recommend any resources for extension development for someone that's beginning from scratch with no experience in this area?
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  I would still recommend the docs from MDN and Google. If you're relatively familiar with web development in general - you can just peruse the APIs that are available for extensions Chromium based: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/ Or for Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... Then hit the MDN "My first extension page" to get a mostly functional manifest file: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Your_first_WebExtension https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... Get familiar with `about:debugging` in firefox, and `chrome://extensions` in chrome - you'll need them to load your test extensions. Finally - It's very worth it to read and understand the "core concepts" as outlined here, starting with the content_scripts: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/content_scripts/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/content_scr...
- mfrisbie 4y ago
  I was frustrated with the lack of resources, so I'm publishing a book on it: "Building Browser Extensions". Available later this year. https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ And check out the companion extension: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/b2x https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/b2x
- dirkf 4y ago
  Wladimir Palant (original creator Adblock Plus and nowadays doing security work with a focus on browser extensions) has recently started a blog series on browser extension security: https://palant.info/2022/08/10/anatomy-of-a-basic-extension/ https://palant.info/2022/08/10/anatomy-of-a-basic-extension/
rjh29 4y ago
> I see plenty of folks in here lamenting this release at all - in the hopes that the lack of it will push folks to Firefox. It won't. Those who care about this are already on Firefox Huh? I'm going to switch to Firefox the second uBlock Origin stops working on Chrome. Otherwise I'll continue to use Chrome because it's a better browser (for me). I don't think I'm some rare minority here.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  > Huh? I'm going to switch to Firefox the second uBlock Origin stops working on Chrome. uBlock Origin already blocks a lot better on Firefox than on Chrome. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
  - rjh29 4y ago
    In practical terms I haven't seen any ads on Chrome so the blocking experience seems good enough. If you care about privacy Firefox definitely seems better.
- Vinnl 4y ago
  I don't think you are either, but like the rest of that group , I expect that you'll keep using Chrome anyway. Because it's not like uBO will stop working, it'll just be a bit worse.
  - rjh29 4y ago
    I dunno. The new version does not strongly affect end users (according to the devs) but there is a psychological barrier around switching from the full version to the minus version, which I think will cause me to switch to Firefox. Even if the new version works now, Google are clearly going to tighten the vice over the next few years.
    - Vinnl 4y ago
      Hmm, I guess it depends on what this will look like long-term, but I'd expect that regular uBO will be "upgraded" to this version when MV2 is deprecated in Chrome for good, possibly including the name change (if allowed by Google). Edit: ah, looking at gorhill's comments it looks like this is not intended to be the MV3 version of uBO, but just one that has minimal permissions. Then I guess uBO will migrate in its own time.
blibble 4y ago
I was fully in the Google world prior to gorhill's posts on manifest v3 as a direct result the only thing I have left is a pixel phone, which will be going with the new iPhone (and in the meantime my entire family has been 'helpfully' migrated too) I may be up the extreme end of the distribution, but this sort of grassroots push is what dethroned IE, and the resultant loss of control of the web eliminated Microsoft's near total influence over the computing industry
- Steltek 4y ago
  Can you explain why you'd switch to an iPhone over a web browser? iPhone is a huge step back for having an open browser with user focused extensions. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
  - blibble 4y ago
    I am hoping the US/EU anti-competitive bills are going to go through (plus my phone is falling apart, and I don't want to give Google another penny after their manifest v3 behaviour)
  - christophilus 4y ago
    I know it's Safari under the hood, but Brave on iOS is great. I do hope that Apple decides to / is forced to allow real 3rd party browsers at some point, though. I also hope that a decent Linux phone becomes a realistic alternative. I'll check back in 10 years to see if either of those materializes.
    - hoten 4y ago
      Probably more like one year. The DMA just passed (I think? I don't follow too closely)
    - gitargy 4y ago
      I'm told ungoogled android distros exist, and are decently usable.
_V_ 4y ago
I will, for sure, switch to FF the second uBlock stops working in Chrome/Chromium. I switched from the Safari on MacOS for just the same reason even though I lost things like ApplePay etc. I am not giving up on uBlock. The web is too bloated and unusable for me without it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
svnpenn 4y ago
- vntok 4y ago
  Please don't tell people to refrain from posting their analysis here, especially when their point is both clear and very logical. It would be better and much more productive if you would explain why you think that Firefox has a bright path ahead given all we know about it's management, strategy, corporate practices, and frankly raw figures about new installs / usage over the past 5 years.
  - kaibee 4y ago
    Switching browsers is not some herculean task. Its like 15 minutes of "work" and a day or two of getting used to it. And your ad-blocker works.
    - Zagill 4y ago
      Does Google autofill transfer over to Firefox easily? I'd reckon that's a big pain point for a lot of people when considering switching browsers
    - linza 4y ago
      It sounds simple enough but it's not so easy actually. I found myself spending some time doing it, and there were enough annoyances to abandon switching to firefox. I really want to like it, it just doesn't click for me. There is just no practical incentive at the moment to switch (for me), just the more idealistic ones about privacy and so on.
- kaibee 4y ago
  I switched to FF a few months after I started hearing about this change coming down the pipe. It was totally fine and easy. I haven't had any issues because of it outside of one weird old website not working perfectly. And I still have Chrome installed so I just used it for a minute in that one case in the last year-ish.
- 4y ago
bambax 4y ago
> Those who care about this are already on Firefox I don't think that's true. Many, many more people would care immensely if they were suddenly deprived of good adblocking on Chrome.
- elephanlemon 4y ago
  I plan to switch to Firefox if this happens. Some like me are just too lazy to do it before we need to!
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  > if they were suddenly deprived of good adblocking on Chrome. Ok - but that won't happen (at least not yet, given the m3 api available, who knows what google will do long term). The majority of users won't genuinely notice any difference between an adblocker running on m3 vs m2, and plenty of companies are going to make them. My point is that despite the push back from the UBO dev (and I sort of agree - this does limit some capabilities, although not nearly as much as he claims) M3 is absolutely not going to kill the adblocker extensions available in chrome. It just makes them... slightly minus. Which is why I think the name is a good call. I don't approve of the direction google is going, but this is not the deal breaker for any sort of public audience - it's just a talking point among the tech literate.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    "The majority of users won't genuinely notice any difference between an adblocker running on m3 vs m2" I think that'll be true for a short time. But once the advertisers figure out that ad blockers have been crippled on the most popular browser... They'll figure out how to take advantage of that. Once Chrome takes away the ability to do live heuristics, and leaves you with just a static-ish blacklist, it's pretty easy to get around the ad blocker.
    - horsawlarway 4y ago
      But you can already work around adblockers by just serving ads directly from your own servers. Frankly - you can also move to a service that implements adblocking at a different layer (I've seen an explosion of dns based adblockers as a service, likely inspired by the likes of pi-hole). Those services are using roughly the same feature set that's still available in m3. The big dealbreaker (imo) was the inability to configure rules at runtime, and the requirement that they be declared in the manifest - and that never actually happened (you can dynamically configure them with https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/declarativeNetRequest/#dynamic-and-session-scoped-rules https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/decla...)
npteljes 4y ago
> it will push folks to Firefox. It won't. 100%. Firefox murdered XUL extensions, a then-thriving ecosystem, and the mobile version's addon support is still very lacking, years later. If the moaning from this haven't stopped them, uBO's lack of mv3 version certainly won't.
ibejoeb 4y ago
The MV3 bugs are stupid ridiculous. Like, I'm gonna open a long-lived communications channel, but it'll be destroyed when the service worker shuts down in an arbitrary n<5 minutes. Okie doke. Clients love to hear it. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1152255 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=115225...
- atdrummond 4y ago
  The comments on that bug are depressing as well. I generally am involved in much more niche development communities - is this kind of disrespectful back and forth the standard these days?
  - ibejoeb 4y ago
    People are kinda bitter about this. You can design around it, but it makes a lot of things way bigger jobs than they should be. I was just explaining my way around this one today. You port from v2 to v3 and all of a sudden it's basically a rewrite to make everything datum serializable and every function re-entrant because you never know when chrome is going kill your process. At this point, it's just the way it is now with Google. They promised Crostini for kaby lake chromebooks (I think; maybe another chip) for like 3 years in a row. A thousand comments on there. People are just frustrated.
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      Oh, I understand the bitterness around Manifest and a lot of it is justifiable. I was referring to the two developers (both seemingly not Google/Chromium affiliated) arguing about a workaround involving an “injectable tab” and taking pot shots at one another’s comprehension and ability.
EbNar 4y ago

clumsysmurf 4y ago

> I do lots of extension development Off topic, but since you seem experienced at this, do you recommend any resources for extension development for someone that's beginning from scratch with no experience in this area?

horsawlarway 4y ago
I would still recommend the docs from MDN and Google. If you're relatively familiar with web development in general - you can just peruse the APIs that are available for extensions Chromium based: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/ Or for Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... Then hit the MDN "My first extension page" to get a mostly functional manifest file: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Your_first_WebExtension https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... Get familiar with `about:debugging` in firefox, and `chrome://extensions` in chrome - you'll need them to load your test extensions. Finally - It's very worth it to read and understand the "core concepts" as outlined here, starting with the content_scripts: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/content_scripts/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/content_scr...
mfrisbie 4y ago
I was frustrated with the lack of resources, so I'm publishing a book on it: "Building Browser Extensions". Available later this year. https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ And check out the companion extension: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/b2x https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/b2x
dirkf 4y ago
Wladimir Palant (original creator Adblock Plus and nowadays doing security work with a focus on browser extensions) has recently started a blog series on browser extension security: https://palant.info/2022/08/10/anatomy-of-a-basic-extension/ https://palant.info/2022/08/10/anatomy-of-a-basic-extension/

rjh29 4y ago

> I see plenty of folks in here lamenting this release at all - in the hopes that the lack of it will push folks to Firefox. It won't. Those who care about this are already on Firefox Huh? I'm going to switch to Firefox the second uBlock Origin stops working on Chrome. Otherwise I'll continue to use Chrome because it's a better browser (for me). I don't think I'm some rare minority here.

TimTheTinker 4y ago
> Huh? I'm going to switch to Firefox the second uBlock Origin stops working on Chrome. uBlock Origin already blocks a lot better on Firefox than on Chrome. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
- rjh29 4y ago
  In practical terms I haven't seen any ads on Chrome so the blocking experience seems good enough. If you care about privacy Firefox definitely seems better.
Vinnl 4y ago
I don't think you are either, but like the rest of that group , I expect that you'll keep using Chrome anyway. Because it's not like uBO will stop working, it'll just be a bit worse.
- rjh29 4y ago
  I dunno. The new version does not strongly affect end users (according to the devs) but there is a psychological barrier around switching from the full version to the minus version, which I think will cause me to switch to Firefox. Even if the new version works now, Google are clearly going to tighten the vice over the next few years.
  - Vinnl 4y ago
    Hmm, I guess it depends on what this will look like long-term, but I'd expect that regular uBO will be "upgraded" to this version when MV2 is deprecated in Chrome for good, possibly including the name change (if allowed by Google). Edit: ah, looking at gorhill's comments it looks like this is not intended to be the MV3 version of uBO, but just one that has minimal permissions. Then I guess uBO will migrate in its own time.

blibble 4y ago

I was fully in the Google world prior to gorhill's posts on manifest v3 as a direct result the only thing I have left is a pixel phone, which will be going with the new iPhone (and in the meantime my entire family has been 'helpfully' migrated too) I may be up the extreme end of the distribution, but this sort of grassroots push is what dethroned IE, and the resultant loss of control of the web eliminated Microsoft's near total influence over the computing industry

Steltek 4y ago
Can you explain why you'd switch to an iPhone over a web browser? iPhone is a huge step back for having an open browser with user focused extensions. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
- blibble 4y ago
  I am hoping the US/EU anti-competitive bills are going to go through (plus my phone is falling apart, and I don't want to give Google another penny after their manifest v3 behaviour)
- christophilus 4y ago
  I know it's Safari under the hood, but Brave on iOS is great. I do hope that Apple decides to / is forced to allow real 3rd party browsers at some point, though. I also hope that a decent Linux phone becomes a realistic alternative. I'll check back in 10 years to see if either of those materializes.
  - hoten 4y ago
    Probably more like one year. The DMA just passed (I think? I don't follow too closely)
  - gitargy 4y ago
    I'm told ungoogled android distros exist, and are decently usable.

_V_ 4y ago

I will, for sure, switch to FF the second uBlock stops working in Chrome/Chromium. I switched from the Safari on MacOS for just the same reason even though I lost things like ApplePay etc. I am not giving up on uBlock. The web is too bloated and unusable for me without it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

svnpenn 4y ago

vntok 4y ago
Please don't tell people to refrain from posting their analysis here, especially when their point is both clear and very logical. It would be better and much more productive if you would explain why you think that Firefox has a bright path ahead given all we know about it's management, strategy, corporate practices, and frankly raw figures about new installs / usage over the past 5 years.
- kaibee 4y ago
  Switching browsers is not some herculean task. Its like 15 minutes of "work" and a day or two of getting used to it. And your ad-blocker works.
  - Zagill 4y ago
    Does Google autofill transfer over to Firefox easily? I'd reckon that's a big pain point for a lot of people when considering switching browsers
  - linza 4y ago
    It sounds simple enough but it's not so easy actually. I found myself spending some time doing it, and there were enough annoyances to abandon switching to firefox. I really want to like it, it just doesn't click for me. There is just no practical incentive at the moment to switch (for me), just the more idealistic ones about privacy and so on.
kaibee 4y ago
I switched to FF a few months after I started hearing about this change coming down the pipe. It was totally fine and easy. I haven't had any issues because of it outside of one weird old website not working perfectly. And I still have Chrome installed so I just used it for a minute in that one case in the last year-ish.
4y ago

bambax 4y ago

> Those who care about this are already on Firefox I don't think that's true. Many, many more people would care immensely if they were suddenly deprived of good adblocking on Chrome.

elephanlemon 4y ago
I plan to switch to Firefox if this happens. Some like me are just too lazy to do it before we need to!
horsawlarway 4y ago
> if they were suddenly deprived of good adblocking on Chrome. Ok - but that won't happen (at least not yet, given the m3 api available, who knows what google will do long term). The majority of users won't genuinely notice any difference between an adblocker running on m3 vs m2, and plenty of companies are going to make them. My point is that despite the push back from the UBO dev (and I sort of agree - this does limit some capabilities, although not nearly as much as he claims) M3 is absolutely not going to kill the adblocker extensions available in chrome. It just makes them... slightly minus. Which is why I think the name is a good call. I don't approve of the direction google is going, but this is not the deal breaker for any sort of public audience - it's just a talking point among the tech literate.
- tyingq 4y ago
  "The majority of users won't genuinely notice any difference between an adblocker running on m3 vs m2" I think that'll be true for a short time. But once the advertisers figure out that ad blockers have been crippled on the most popular browser... They'll figure out how to take advantage of that. Once Chrome takes away the ability to do live heuristics, and leaves you with just a static-ish blacklist, it's pretty easy to get around the ad blocker.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    But you can already work around adblockers by just serving ads directly from your own servers. Frankly - you can also move to a service that implements adblocking at a different layer (I've seen an explosion of dns based adblockers as a service, likely inspired by the likes of pi-hole). Those services are using roughly the same feature set that's still available in m3. The big dealbreaker (imo) was the inability to configure rules at runtime, and the requirement that they be declared in the manifest - and that never actually happened (you can dynamically configure them with https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/declarativeNetRequest/#dynamic-and-session-scoped-rules https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/decla...)

npteljes 4y ago

> it will push folks to Firefox. It won't. 100%. Firefox murdered XUL extensions, a then-thriving ecosystem, and the mobile version's addon support is still very lacking, years later. If the moaning from this haven't stopped them, uBO's lack of mv3 version certainly won't.

ibejoeb 4y ago

The MV3 bugs are stupid ridiculous. Like, I'm gonna open a long-lived communications channel, but it'll be destroyed when the service worker shuts down in an arbitrary n<5 minutes. Okie doke. Clients love to hear it. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1152255 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=115225...

atdrummond 4y ago
The comments on that bug are depressing as well. I generally am involved in much more niche development communities - is this kind of disrespectful back and forth the standard these days?
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  People are kinda bitter about this. You can design around it, but it makes a lot of things way bigger jobs than they should be. I was just explaining my way around this one today. You port from v2 to v3 and all of a sudden it's basically a rewrite to make everything datum serializable and every function re-entrant because you never know when chrome is going kill your process. At this point, it's just the way it is now with Google. They promised Crostini for kaby lake chromebooks (I think; maybe another chip) for like 3 years in a row. A thousand comments on there. People are just frustrated.
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    Oh, I understand the bitterness around Manifest and a lot of it is justifiable. I was referring to the two developers (both seemingly not Google/Chromium affiliated) arguing about a workaround involving an “injectable tab” and taking pot shots at one another’s comprehension and ability.

EbNar 4y ago