17 ms·

Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support current content blockers

642 points by bj-rn 4y ago

anvic 4y ago
I read somewhere that even though Mozilla will continue supporting the ad blocking API from manifest v2, the rest of manifest v2 will be completely dropped so most of the extensions that I use like greasemonkey will stop working. Is that true?
- lapcat 4y ago
  No.
- tyingq 4y ago
  There's a migration guide here: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest-v3-migration-guide/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest... Since they aren't taking away the onBeforeRequest() functionality, I don't see a good reason why greasemonkey can't be ported over.
  - anvic 4y ago
    Under "Scripting API" it says "the code parameter is removed so that arbitrary strings can no longer be executed [...] you need to move any arbitrary strings executed as scripts to files". I don't see how something like greasemonkey can continue existing given that limitation.
    - tyingq 4y ago
      Ah, yeah, that does look like a gap. Tampermonkey's related issue, though it seems to be mostly focused on Chrome: https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644 https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644
      - lapcat 4y ago
        This is because Firefox is adding Manifest v3 support without dropping v2 support, unlike Chrome.
- coldpie 4y ago
  Googling "tampermonkey manifest v3" lead me to this issue, which has a lot of relevant discussion: https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644 https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
as a person whohas exclusively used firefox all my life, even on my android, i have both firefox and focus, this is quite good news. the only problem i can imagine is the invisible pressure by the unending desire to become chrome,you know with hiding the search bar by default "because people are used to that from chrome" and other shenanigans, i feel this support might be shortlived because the stupid people managing firefox are paid by google to fuck up firefox in the worst possible way and this just feels another attempt in that regard. btw, i've been online since 2004, daily so i have used a lot of firefox
- isaacremuant 4y ago
  I think along the same lines. Mozilla has forgotten a lot of the political fights of the past around freedom and customisation and instead focused on US partisan talking points supporting censorship and forgetting about the desires of core users. I, too, feel that eventually they might just go: "Everyone is doing it and it cost us more effort to keep maintaining it, here you have our own internal blocking, which won't block Google related stuff because they fund us" All I know is. It's my device. Not Google's and I intend to fight that battle, just like we did with Microsoft.
- Svip 4y ago
  I was saddened recently when I learnt they changed "View image" to "Open image in new tab". I loved the way "View image" worked, allowing you to maintain the image in full view while preserving tab history. If you wanted to open it a new tab, you could middle click it or ctrl click it. But since users were used to the Chrome behaviour they changed it to match, and thus Firefox lost a functionality. Unfortunately, since this is such a niche use case, Mozilla has little incentive to restore it. (Note: Extensions that restore the context menu item fails when the image loading relies on the REFERER header, since it actively re-requests it.) There are numerous smaller items like this, that just flowed a lot better, particularly if you're heavily browsing images, like tab previews, that have been sacrificed either in the name of performance or to be more like Chrome. Fortunately, SeaMonkey still maintains these classic features, but is unfortunately a memory hog. My daily browser has also been Firefox since around 2004. SeaMonkey remains a time pocket, when I long for the old days of yore.
MintDice 4y ago
Yeah I mean, they have to. It's open source software so it could be forked otherwise and also, if they abandoned this core principle anyway, they would lose their entire user base in droves. There would be no faster way to nuke the entire product. Which is a good thing.
- jraph 4y ago
  A browser is hard to fork, and a fork of a browser is hard to maintain. They might be able to get away with not doing this. The reality is that this time, they are taking a good decision, on its own, not because they have to for some reason, and this should be recognized as-is. They took enough bad decisions we can attack, no need to belittle them for this one.
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    I think the assumption is that some browser engineers will also break off if a fork is ever created. Because I agree, a browser fork is hard to maintain. So we plebian users must rely on one or two experienced engineers being on our side.
    - DoctorOW 4y ago
      Is it reasonable to make that assumption? How many ex-Mozilla work on Firefox forks now? How many ex-Google work on Chrome forks? Genuine questions...
      - INTPenis 4y ago
        I can't answer that, I guess what I was trying to say was that if a fork is ever created its chances of success depend on how many, if any, experienced browser engineers join it.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    People belittle Firefox and its parent company out of both love and fear because it's one of the few bastions remaining in a sea of botnets and data siphons. And no, le shill lion doesn't count.
l0b0 4y ago
The fact that they're even spelling this out means it's going to be reversed soonish. Fortunately Firefox (or at least the original iisdea of a lightweight free-as-in-freedom browser) is ready for another fork.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  If they didn't spell this out loudly, people would accuse them being silent and waiting for the day to silently pull the plug, then. With your point of view, there's no way to tell the truth.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    There is: they could just say "We are going to eventually follow Google/remove it, albeit maybe not today".
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      You're assuming it's going to be removed eventually. I have no such assumption. Also your wording sets an unjust precedent when there's no reason to have one.
  - l0b0 4y ago
    No, in my point of view this sort of thing should be too obvious to mention. Once they start making it explit, people will immediately start questioning it.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      We are not sharing the same perspective and experience, I may say, and that's OK.
- foepys 4y ago
  This is baseless speculation. Firefox already has more APIs than Chrome to support content blocking. E.g. DNS uncloaking and reliably blocking content loading on startup is impossible for extensions in Chrome.
dotHappy 4y ago
i know that we're all sure that even if mozilla reverses this decision, we'll have good forks... but, we neeed to be sure to have them on our side... open internet needs people like mozilla
jrootabega 4y ago
Seeing this in this context just made me realize that it's weird to consider them "blockers", a loaded term. As if we're starting from some default, correct state, and then blocking part of it. We've always been able to choose what content we navigate to. These are content selectors/choosers, which just support our existing ability to choose what content we request and actions we take.
- swores 4y ago
  I disagree completely, "blockers" is accurate. The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive. Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.
  - _flux 4y ago
    The "end game" from the user's point of view would if someone indeed came up with "content selectors". It would be quite an achievement to build one that was actually useful. Maybe easy version could work exactly the same way as blockers do, except they'd invert the way the rules are evaluted, and of course the rules would need to be custom as well. And then if the rules would fail to find some actual content on the page, then I guess you might not even know about it :).
    - amelius 4y ago
      The end game would be some AI running on a gpu in your monitor, so the browser nor the originating website need to know about any blocking.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        Except you'd still have client-side execution in that case. Obviously not everyone cares, but there are some straightforward objective reasons to care if you're blocking it being rendered anyway, like why waste cycles on it.
superkuh 4y ago
Is Mozilla really trying to juxtapose themselves here against another browser that removes support for power user customization like they don't do it? That's wild. Is there no one left at Moz that remembers them throwing away the entire ecosystem of XUL based extensions that allowed for many things that current Firefox builds don't re: blocking and UI customization. Mozilla literally did this back in the version 37 and only Firefox forks remain to support the full set of extension features. I guess we're all amnesiacs or the pot is just being boiled slowly enough to not notice.
- bugmen0t 4y ago
  the old APIs were actually the only existing, internal and synchronous APIs which does not work in a multi-process, site-isolation architecture. The internal APIs also had to go. What else would you do?
  - noisem4ker 4y ago
    Unfortunately not many seem to remember that brief period when the old add-on APIs were being ported and made to work with a multi-process architecture, as part of the effort known as Electrolysis [1], with appreciable results, before being completely killed in favor of WebExtensions. I'm sure there were significant technical challenges, but let's not use these to hide the political reasons behind such a drastic move. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
    - bugmen0t 4y ago
      These APIs were synchronous and thus blocking. People blamed Firefox being slow when in fact, it was mostly extension APIs and the extension code.
    - sfink 4y ago
      Electrolysis was an easier thing to handle, and some APIs would still have been lost. Fission (process-per-origin) came later and would have broken many, many more. So people would have still been pissed off at Mozilla (the difference between levels of breakage would have been lost), and Mozilla would still be on the hook for supporting a barely supportable API. Without the resources that would require.
adjagu 4y ago
"These weeks in Firefox: issue 124" was referenced in the post, but was not linked. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2022/09/21/these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-124/ https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2022/09/21/these-weeks-in-f...
nathias 4y ago
I'm feeling nostalgic for the times where monopolies were broken up ...
AnonHP 4y ago
Good to hear the reaffirmation from Mozilla that the blocking WebRequest API would be retained. A little over three years ago, Mozilla had promised that it wouldn’t just blindly follow Google on Manifest v3 to the letter. [1] Considering that uBlock Origin works best and can do the most in Firefox with this continuing support, I’m glad Mozilla is still walking the talk on this one. We need at least one browser that makes the web usable, and that might as well be Firefox with uBlock Origin. Edit: Oops. Missed providing the link reference below earlier. [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest-v3-faq/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest...
- flatiron 4y ago
  I really need to learn the Firefox debugger. My years of chrome debugger muscle memory has tied me to that product (at least for work which is 95% of my desktop browsing) Personally I’m a mobile personal browser person which is safari. I can’t stand to be at a computer after a day of being at the computer.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    Can you give an example of a feature that's so different or missing in Firefox devtools? The only differences that come to my mind are super minor (chrome logging 400er requests to console, Firefox having more advanced grid/flex debugging. I'm kinda interested if I'm missing a super obvious feature that's commonly used.
    - Roritharr 4y ago
      If he's anything like me, it's just the muscle memory part. My understanding of JavaScript grew basically alongside the evolution of the Chrome DevTools, so there's quite a lot of subconscious navigation that just feels more intuitively, to me, in Chrome. It's also a psychological bond to a certain extent, having relied on them during stressful times in my career... before that I had only FireBug and that served a similar purpose but didn't teach me quite as well and did never reach the status of "if the Chrome Devtools are open, I can understand what's going on here"-sense of security & confidence.
indymike 4y ago
Suddenly Firefox is interesting and Chrome is not. We need to stop thinking of people as users and start thinking them computer owners. Users work when you are sharing a computer, but for installed software, we should think owner instead.
unixbane 4y ago
It should content block itself.
- beeboop 4y ago
  I’d take content blocking this comment
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Most sane Chrome/Safari/Edge user
est31 4y ago
The big test is not now, when Chromium discontinues content blockers, but when renewal of the contract with Google is up. For Google there is a big incentive in getting rid of ad blockers, and they have a lot of power over Mozilla being the party that is responsible for most of Mozilla's revenue.
- toastal 4y ago
  Google keeps Mozilla propped up to avoid anti-trust.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Or to keep Google Search dominant, which is why they pay Apple $billions per year to be the default engine in Safari, a deal that may invite antitrust.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    I think Google has enough regulatory capture to not worry about anti-trust. In a perfect world, anti-trust would have broken up Google and Meta a long time ago. Our anti-trust investigations have been a joke since MCI. Think about it, USA is respectfully speaking a corporatocratic country; biting the hands that feed is in nobody's interest. John Q Public does not pay the bills and doesn't hold the most personal data and location of the majority of the inhabitants of this planet.
    - gpm 4y ago
      Google just 10 days ago lost its appeal of a 4 billion dollar anti-trust fine.
      - rofrol 4y ago
        in Europe Union not USA
      - aliqot 4y ago
        4 billion dollars is less of a fine and more of a participation fee, a cost of doing business.
westurner 4y ago
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: indicate that DNS is locally overridden by entries in /etc/hosts - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: Browser UI: indicate that a domain does not have DNSSEC record signatures - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBT: Browser UI: indicate whether DNS is over classic UDP or DoH, DoT, DoQ (DNS-over-QUIC) - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: browser: indicate that a page is modified by extensions; show a "tamper bit" - [ ] ENH,SEC: Devtools?: indicate whether there are (matching) HTTP SRI Subresource Integrity signatures for any or some of the page assets - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: a "DNS Domain(s) Information" modal_tab/panel like the Certificate Information panel
dbg31415 4y ago
Two easy ways to block trackers and ads... without a firewall. Adding blockers to the hosts table still works with Chrome... hope they don't muck with that... https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts But if they do... there are always DNS solutions you can add to your Router. https://nextdns.io/ https://nextdns.io/ I use Firefox, but even things like Windows spams ads at you if you let it. So many things have Google trackers built in too...
- celsoazevedo 4y ago
  You can't use DNS/hosts to block ads on sites like YouTube because they use the same domain to load ads and videos. To block the ads you have to block the video itself. So while still useful, that's not really a replacement for browser extensions.
- howinteresting 4y ago
  The problem with these approaches is that it's much harder to exclude individual sites that break.
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  This comment reminds me of the crazy spammer who used to frequent Slashdot, always with a long comment about how to use hosts file and how it is superior to every other method of blocking content.
aendruk 4y ago
How long until Google’s campaign that Firefox is an illegitimate browser
beej71 4y ago
I switched back to Firefox a while ago, and love it. I keep trying to think of how it could be kept afloat once Google stops funding it. IIRC they get $400 million annually. There are 200 million FF users. $2 each wouldn't be bad... But realistically only 1% of the users would donate and $200 is unpalatable. Maybe another organization picks it up and runs it more efficiently or at a loss for advertising? Or...?
- toxicFork 4y ago
  Do they really need 400m?
  - lolinder 4y ago
    This question was downvoted but I think it's fair. There's a lot of evidence that Mozilla is pretty bloated as a company, and if they shed a lot of that bloat I see no reason to suppose they couldn't keep maintaining Firefox on a much smaller budget.
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    If you have it, it doesn't matter, you will spend it and scream for more. Look at wikipedia. Wikipedia collected 162m in revenue (no ads!) and spent 112m dollars! I'd be curious to dig into what % of that goes to core wikipedia and what % goes ancillary projects. You'd have to dig very deeply into their finances to figure that out. Firefox should set apart a large chunk of that 400m/year in an endowment intended for Firefox to continue and to be independent in perpetuity. That could easily be a multiple-billion dollar endowment by now and their spending and growth from that spending should be on revenue from that endowment.
    - sfink 4y ago
      If you're a company sitting on a large mountain of cash, then your finance team isn't doing its job. Money is there to be used, unless you happen to have some sort of monopoly. And Mozilla obviously doesn't. Competing with Google and Microsoft funded competitors ain't cheap. And requires more than developers. People don't play that nice, at least not when there's an advantage to playing dirty. And there is.
bdw5204 4y ago
This is one thing that has the potential to cause significant numbers of people to switch from Chrome to Firefox. The modern web is unusable without a good ad blocker and its inexplicable to me that it isn't a built-in feature enabled by default in every browser like pop-up blocking. You shouldn't have to install extensions just to get essential functionality from your browser.
- snek_case 4y ago
  The problem is that Google has a conflict of interest as both a browser developer and a platform for people to sell you ads. People selling ads to Google must be putting pressure on them to do this... Or maybe they have internal pressure to maximize revenues. At the end of the day, yeah, it seems like it might cause people to switch. I'm also honestly wondering, how long until a real competitor to YouTube surfaces? I realize that this is hard to build (though we do have multiple streaming platforms in existence), but Google has been playing this slowly boiling frog experiment with ads on YouTube. Now you have multiple ads per video, coupled with ads baked within the videos themselves, and sponsored content. If you don't pay for YT premium, it's kind of unusable. The worse the product gets, the more of an opening is created for the competition. Seems like a matter of when rather than a matter of if? What if Amazon or Apple created a YT alternative that was ad-free, maybe with some paid content to sponsor creators (pay $2 a month to get bonus content from this channel). They could afford to sink money into it and it could be very disruptive, but it's like they don't dare. Maybe they're afraid to associate their name with a product that could fail, kind of like Google Plus.
  - nickjj 4y ago
    There is a conflict of interest but with the amount of data Google has, they have to know it won't work out in a way that benefits them if they block adblockers. Technical users have what is probably the lowest tolerance to BS that's humanly possible when it comes to the web viewing experience. The web without an adblocker is really really bad, to the point where I would instantly switch to another browser that continued to allow adblockers. The user experience of that browser wouldn't even matter as long as pages rendered and it worked reasonably well, that is already a million times better than having a ton of ads forced upon you. I don't know about you but I also can't remember the last time I saw a paid ad and thought "wow, I want that" and then bought it. It just doesn't happen for me. If I end up buying something it's because there was a gap somewhere and a product filled that gap. I'm going to attempt to research the problem (the gap) and find a solution (various products) from a non-biased source before I buy it. This involves organic search results. Basically a paid ad that would have been blocked by an adblocker is going to have a 0% chance of converting me into a buyer. Also, most non-technical users don't even know what an adblocker is. Unless someone set one up for them they are seeing ads. It seems weird to me they would spend a lot of effort into trying to block adblockers. The audience who uses them likely has a very small chance of ever buying something because of a paid ad and a large chunk of users don't use adblockers. This whole scenario reminds me of Let's Encrypt in a way. If push comes to shove and major browser vendors like Chrome prevented adblockers something tells me some of the best minds in this space will come together and make a browser that will be technically better in every way possible.
jokoon 4y ago
why can't ublock origin work properly with this manifest v3?
- Volundr 4y ago
  Because the webrequest blocking API is being removed.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    The declarativeNetRequest was added which allows a similar capability without causing privacy or performance issues.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      - dang 4y ago
        Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly and that's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        encryptluks2 4y ago
- DeathMetal3000 4y ago
  Because an advertising company (Google) designed it just for such a purpose.
  - SquareWheel 4y ago
    Considering that Google's ad providers, analytics, and general services are so easily blockable in the new API, that reasoning doesn't hold water.
classified 4y ago
Good, that's why I use Firefox. Still can't help but find it strange that ads are called "content" now.
- ta8903 4y ago
  Ads aren't considered content, uBO is called a content blocker because it can block all kinds of DOM content and not just ads.
rejectfinite 4y ago
Good. On Windows atleast Firefox is just as fast as Chrome. Even for heavy sites like Twitch/Youtube. Ublock origin works the best, vertical tabs from extensions etc so I dont really miss any features. Maybe the Vivaldi F2 command line. Edge is still faster but its good that the default Windows browser is finally good.
rejectfinite 4y ago
Random note, but I missed the slimmer tabs from Vivaldi and Brave and the older Firefox themes. This works, its just hidden. Says unsupported but works fine in Nightly even so far. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...
rapjr9 4y ago
Pihole blocks ads for an entire network, so why does a content blocker have to be built into the browser? Can't it just be a separate app you run, outside the browser? Even if the browser is using HTTPS the URL and IP address for everything not from the site you are on is visible. The app could even run as a fake proxy. Scripts would be harder to block if they are sent encrypted, but since you can view the scripts in a browser and hence know the exact content of the script maybe it would be easy to snip them out of the encrypted stream by automatically generating signatures or formulas for what to snip for the scripts from various sites. You could even use an embedded browser in the app to decode and format the entire page, automatically determine what to snip, do the snip, and then forward the modified stream to the users primary web browser (with some delay). Any checksums could be modified appropriately. The app could present a GUI in the primary browser that the user could use to decide what to block. Are the page contents protected by a cryptographic signature? Does not seem like it would matter since the embedded browser certainly has the ability to decrypt everything. Data in the reverse direction could be sent unmodified. Maybe the slowdown caused by filtering everything this way would be unacceptable to users? Some users might find it acceptable in exchange for greater control.
- timvisee 4y ago
  A blocker like uBlock Origin does much more than DNS level blocking. There are many cases where that isn't enough.
styfle 4y ago
The maintainer of uBlock Origin posted a detailed comment about converting from v2 to v3 here: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-1253893421 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss... It’s really worth a read to better understand the pros and cons of this new API.

642 points by bj-rn 4y ago

I read somewhere that even though Mozilla will continue supporting the ad blocking API from manifest v2, the rest of manifest v2 will be completely dropped so most of the extensions that I use like greasemonkey will stop working. Is that true?

lapcat 4y ago
No.
tyingq 4y ago
There's a migration guide here: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest-v3-migration-guide/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest... Since they aren't taking away the onBeforeRequest() functionality, I don't see a good reason why greasemonkey can't be ported over.
- anvic 4y ago
  Under "Scripting API" it says "the code parameter is removed so that arbitrary strings can no longer be executed [...] you need to move any arbitrary strings executed as scripts to files". I don't see how something like greasemonkey can continue existing given that limitation.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Ah, yeah, that does look like a gap. Tampermonkey's related issue, though it seems to be mostly focused on Chrome: https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644 https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644
    - lapcat 4y ago
      This is because Firefox is adding Manifest v3 support without dropping v2 support, unlike Chrome.
coldpie 4y ago
Googling "tampermonkey manifest v3" lead me to this issue, which has a lot of relevant discussion: https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644 https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

as a person whohas exclusively used firefox all my life, even on my android, i have both firefox and focus, this is quite good news. the only problem i can imagine is the invisible pressure by the unending desire to become chrome,you know with hiding the search bar by default "because people are used to that from chrome" and other shenanigans, i feel this support might be shortlived because the stupid people managing firefox are paid by google to fuck up firefox in the worst possible way and this just feels another attempt in that regard. btw, i've been online since 2004, daily so i have used a lot of firefox

isaacremuant 4y ago
I think along the same lines. Mozilla has forgotten a lot of the political fights of the past around freedom and customisation and instead focused on US partisan talking points supporting censorship and forgetting about the desires of core users. I, too, feel that eventually they might just go: "Everyone is doing it and it cost us more effort to keep maintaining it, here you have our own internal blocking, which won't block Google related stuff because they fund us" All I know is. It's my device. Not Google's and I intend to fight that battle, just like we did with Microsoft.
Svip 4y ago
I was saddened recently when I learnt they changed "View image" to "Open image in new tab". I loved the way "View image" worked, allowing you to maintain the image in full view while preserving tab history. If you wanted to open it a new tab, you could middle click it or ctrl click it. But since users were used to the Chrome behaviour they changed it to match, and thus Firefox lost a functionality. Unfortunately, since this is such a niche use case, Mozilla has little incentive to restore it. (Note: Extensions that restore the context menu item fails when the image loading relies on the REFERER header, since it actively re-requests it.) There are numerous smaller items like this, that just flowed a lot better, particularly if you're heavily browsing images, like tab previews, that have been sacrificed either in the name of performance or to be more like Chrome. Fortunately, SeaMonkey still maintains these classic features, but is unfortunately a memory hog. My daily browser has also been Firefox since around 2004. SeaMonkey remains a time pocket, when I long for the old days of yore.

MintDice 4y ago

Yeah I mean, they have to. It's open source software so it could be forked otherwise and also, if they abandoned this core principle anyway, they would lose their entire user base in droves. There would be no faster way to nuke the entire product. Which is a good thing.

jraph 4y ago
A browser is hard to fork, and a fork of a browser is hard to maintain. They might be able to get away with not doing this. The reality is that this time, they are taking a good decision, on its own, not because they have to for some reason, and this should be recognized as-is. They took enough bad decisions we can attack, no need to belittle them for this one.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  I think the assumption is that some browser engineers will also break off if a fork is ever created. Because I agree, a browser fork is hard to maintain. So we plebian users must rely on one or two experienced engineers being on our side.
  - DoctorOW 4y ago
    Is it reasonable to make that assumption? How many ex-Mozilla work on Firefox forks now? How many ex-Google work on Chrome forks? Genuine questions...
    - INTPenis 4y ago
      I can't answer that, I guess what I was trying to say was that if a fork is ever created its chances of success depend on how many, if any, experienced browser engineers join it.
- Bakary 4y ago
  People belittle Firefox and its parent company out of both love and fear because it's one of the few bastions remaining in a sea of botnets and data siphons. And no, le shill lion doesn't count.

l0b0 4y ago

The fact that they're even spelling this out means it's going to be reversed soonish. Fortunately Firefox (or at least the original iisdea of a lightweight free-as-in-freedom browser) is ready for another fork.

bayindirh 4y ago
If they didn't spell this out loudly, people would accuse them being silent and waiting for the day to silently pull the plug, then. With your point of view, there's no way to tell the truth.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  There is: they could just say "We are going to eventually follow Google/remove it, albeit maybe not today".
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    You're assuming it's going to be removed eventually. I have no such assumption. Also your wording sets an unjust precedent when there's no reason to have one.
- l0b0 4y ago
  No, in my point of view this sort of thing should be too obvious to mention. Once they start making it explit, people will immediately start questioning it.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    We are not sharing the same perspective and experience, I may say, and that's OK.
foepys 4y ago
This is baseless speculation. Firefox already has more APIs than Chrome to support content blocking. E.g. DNS uncloaking and reliably blocking content loading on startup is impossible for extensions in Chrome.

dotHappy 4y ago

i know that we're all sure that even if mozilla reverses this decision, we'll have good forks... but, we neeed to be sure to have them on our side... open internet needs people like mozilla

jrootabega 4y ago

Seeing this in this context just made me realize that it's weird to consider them "blockers", a loaded term. As if we're starting from some default, correct state, and then blocking part of it. We've always been able to choose what content we navigate to. These are content selectors/choosers, which just support our existing ability to choose what content we request and actions we take.

swores 4y ago
I disagree completely, "blockers" is accurate. The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive. Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.
- _flux 4y ago
  The "end game" from the user's point of view would if someone indeed came up with "content selectors". It would be quite an achievement to build one that was actually useful. Maybe easy version could work exactly the same way as blockers do, except they'd invert the way the rules are evaluted, and of course the rules would need to be custom as well. And then if the rules would fail to find some actual content on the page, then I guess you might not even know about it :).
  - amelius 4y ago
    The end game would be some AI running on a gpu in your monitor, so the browser nor the originating website need to know about any blocking.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Except you'd still have client-side execution in that case. Obviously not everyone cares, but there are some straightforward objective reasons to care if you're blocking it being rendered anyway, like why waste cycles on it.

superkuh 4y ago

Is Mozilla really trying to juxtapose themselves here against another browser that removes support for power user customization like they don't do it? That's wild. Is there no one left at Moz that remembers them throwing away the entire ecosystem of XUL based extensions that allowed for many things that current Firefox builds don't re: blocking and UI customization. Mozilla literally did this back in the version 37 and only Firefox forks remain to support the full set of extension features. I guess we're all amnesiacs or the pot is just being boiled slowly enough to not notice.

bugmen0t 4y ago
the old APIs were actually the only existing, internal and synchronous APIs which does not work in a multi-process, site-isolation architecture. The internal APIs also had to go. What else would you do?
- noisem4ker 4y ago
  Unfortunately not many seem to remember that brief period when the old add-on APIs were being ported and made to work with a multi-process architecture, as part of the effort known as Electrolysis [1], with appreciable results, before being completely killed in favor of WebExtensions. I'm sure there were significant technical challenges, but let's not use these to hide the political reasons behind such a drastic move. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
  - bugmen0t 4y ago
    These APIs were synchronous and thus blocking. People blamed Firefox being slow when in fact, it was mostly extension APIs and the extension code.
  - sfink 4y ago
    Electrolysis was an easier thing to handle, and some APIs would still have been lost. Fission (process-per-origin) came later and would have broken many, many more. So people would have still been pissed off at Mozilla (the difference between levels of breakage would have been lost), and Mozilla would still be on the hook for supporting a barely supportable API. Without the resources that would require.

adjagu 4y ago

"These weeks in Firefox: issue 124" was referenced in the post, but was not linked. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2022/09/21/these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-124/ https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2022/09/21/these-weeks-in-f...

nathias 4y ago

I'm feeling nostalgic for the times where monopolies were broken up ...

AnonHP 4y ago

Good to hear the reaffirmation from Mozilla that the blocking WebRequest API would be retained. A little over three years ago, Mozilla had promised that it wouldn’t just blindly follow Google on Manifest v3 to the letter. [1] Considering that uBlock Origin works best and can do the most in Firefox with this continuing support, I’m glad Mozilla is still walking the talk on this one. We need at least one browser that makes the web usable, and that might as well be Firefox with uBlock Origin. Edit: Oops. Missed providing the link reference below earlier. [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest-v3-faq/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest...

flatiron 4y ago
I really need to learn the Firefox debugger. My years of chrome debugger muscle memory has tied me to that product (at least for work which is 95% of my desktop browsing) Personally I’m a mobile personal browser person which is safari. I can’t stand to be at a computer after a day of being at the computer.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  Can you give an example of a feature that's so different or missing in Firefox devtools? The only differences that come to my mind are super minor (chrome logging 400er requests to console, Firefox having more advanced grid/flex debugging. I'm kinda interested if I'm missing a super obvious feature that's commonly used.
  - Roritharr 4y ago
    If he's anything like me, it's just the muscle memory part. My understanding of JavaScript grew basically alongside the evolution of the Chrome DevTools, so there's quite a lot of subconscious navigation that just feels more intuitively, to me, in Chrome. It's also a psychological bond to a certain extent, having relied on them during stressful times in my career... before that I had only FireBug and that served a similar purpose but didn't teach me quite as well and did never reach the status of "if the Chrome Devtools are open, I can understand what's going on here"-sense of security & confidence.

indymike 4y ago

Suddenly Firefox is interesting and Chrome is not. We need to stop thinking of people as users and start thinking them computer owners. Users work when you are sharing a computer, but for installed software, we should think owner instead.

unixbane 4y ago

It should content block itself.

beeboop 4y ago
I’d take content blocking this comment
rejectfinite 4y ago
Most sane Chrome/Safari/Edge user

est31 4y ago

The big test is not now, when Chromium discontinues content blockers, but when renewal of the contract with Google is up. For Google there is a big incentive in getting rid of ad blockers, and they have a lot of power over Mozilla being the party that is responsible for most of Mozilla's revenue.

toastal 4y ago
Google keeps Mozilla propped up to avoid anti-trust.
- lapcat 4y ago
  Or to keep Google Search dominant, which is why they pay Apple $billions per year to be the default engine in Safari, a deal that may invite antitrust.
- aliqot 4y ago
  I think Google has enough regulatory capture to not worry about anti-trust. In a perfect world, anti-trust would have broken up Google and Meta a long time ago. Our anti-trust investigations have been a joke since MCI. Think about it, USA is respectfully speaking a corporatocratic country; biting the hands that feed is in nobody's interest. John Q Public does not pay the bills and doesn't hold the most personal data and location of the majority of the inhabitants of this planet.
  - gpm 4y ago
    Google just 10 days ago lost its appeal of a 4 billion dollar anti-trust fine.
    - rofrol 4y ago
      in Europe Union not USA
    - aliqot 4y ago
      4 billion dollars is less of a fine and more of a participation fee, a cost of doing business.

westurner 4y ago

- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: indicate that DNS is locally overridden by entries in /etc/hosts - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: Browser UI: indicate that a domain does not have DNSSEC record signatures - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBT: Browser UI: indicate whether DNS is over classic UDP or DoH, DoT, DoQ (DNS-over-QUIC) - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: browser: indicate that a page is modified by extensions; show a "tamper bit" - [ ] ENH,SEC: Devtools?: indicate whether there are (matching) HTTP SRI Subresource Integrity signatures for any or some of the page assets - [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: a "DNS Domain(s) Information" modal_tab/panel like the Certificate Information panel

dbg31415 4y ago

Two easy ways to block trackers and ads... without a firewall. Adding blockers to the hosts table still works with Chrome... hope they don't muck with that... https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts But if they do... there are always DNS solutions you can add to your Router. https://nextdns.io/ https://nextdns.io/ I use Firefox, but even things like Windows spams ads at you if you let it. So many things have Google trackers built in too...

celsoazevedo 4y ago
You can't use DNS/hosts to block ads on sites like YouTube because they use the same domain to load ads and videos. To block the ads you have to block the video itself. So while still useful, that's not really a replacement for browser extensions.
howinteresting 4y ago
The problem with these approaches is that it's much harder to exclude individual sites that break.
perryizgr8 4y ago
This comment reminds me of the crazy spammer who used to frequent Slashdot, always with a long comment about how to use hosts file and how it is superior to every other method of blocking content.

aendruk 4y ago

How long until Google’s campaign that Firefox is an illegitimate browser

beej71 4y ago

I switched back to Firefox a while ago, and love it. I keep trying to think of how it could be kept afloat once Google stops funding it. IIRC they get $400 million annually. There are 200 million FF users. $2 each wouldn't be bad... But realistically only 1% of the users would donate and $200 is unpalatable. Maybe another organization picks it up and runs it more efficiently or at a loss for advertising? Or...?

toxicFork 4y ago
Do they really need 400m?
- lolinder 4y ago
  This question was downvoted but I think it's fair. There's a lot of evidence that Mozilla is pretty bloated as a company, and if they shed a lot of that bloat I see no reason to suppose they couldn't keep maintaining Firefox on a much smaller budget.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  If you have it, it doesn't matter, you will spend it and scream for more. Look at wikipedia. Wikipedia collected 162m in revenue (no ads!) and spent 112m dollars! I'd be curious to dig into what % of that goes to core wikipedia and what % goes ancillary projects. You'd have to dig very deeply into their finances to figure that out. Firefox should set apart a large chunk of that 400m/year in an endowment intended for Firefox to continue and to be independent in perpetuity. That could easily be a multiple-billion dollar endowment by now and their spending and growth from that spending should be on revenue from that endowment.
  - sfink 4y ago
    If you're a company sitting on a large mountain of cash, then your finance team isn't doing its job. Money is there to be used, unless you happen to have some sort of monopoly. And Mozilla obviously doesn't. Competing with Google and Microsoft funded competitors ain't cheap. And requires more than developers. People don't play that nice, at least not when there's an advantage to playing dirty. And there is.

bdw5204 4y ago

This is one thing that has the potential to cause significant numbers of people to switch from Chrome to Firefox. The modern web is unusable without a good ad blocker and its inexplicable to me that it isn't a built-in feature enabled by default in every browser like pop-up blocking. You shouldn't have to install extensions just to get essential functionality from your browser.

snek_case 4y ago
The problem is that Google has a conflict of interest as both a browser developer and a platform for people to sell you ads. People selling ads to Google must be putting pressure on them to do this... Or maybe they have internal pressure to maximize revenues. At the end of the day, yeah, it seems like it might cause people to switch. I'm also honestly wondering, how long until a real competitor to YouTube surfaces? I realize that this is hard to build (though we do have multiple streaming platforms in existence), but Google has been playing this slowly boiling frog experiment with ads on YouTube. Now you have multiple ads per video, coupled with ads baked within the videos themselves, and sponsored content. If you don't pay for YT premium, it's kind of unusable. The worse the product gets, the more of an opening is created for the competition. Seems like a matter of when rather than a matter of if? What if Amazon or Apple created a YT alternative that was ad-free, maybe with some paid content to sponsor creators (pay $2 a month to get bonus content from this channel). They could afford to sink money into it and it could be very disruptive, but it's like they don't dare. Maybe they're afraid to associate their name with a product that could fail, kind of like Google Plus.
- nickjj 4y ago
  There is a conflict of interest but with the amount of data Google has, they have to know it won't work out in a way that benefits them if they block adblockers. Technical users have what is probably the lowest tolerance to BS that's humanly possible when it comes to the web viewing experience. The web without an adblocker is really really bad, to the point where I would instantly switch to another browser that continued to allow adblockers. The user experience of that browser wouldn't even matter as long as pages rendered and it worked reasonably well, that is already a million times better than having a ton of ads forced upon you. I don't know about you but I also can't remember the last time I saw a paid ad and thought "wow, I want that" and then bought it. It just doesn't happen for me. If I end up buying something it's because there was a gap somewhere and a product filled that gap. I'm going to attempt to research the problem (the gap) and find a solution (various products) from a non-biased source before I buy it. This involves organic search results. Basically a paid ad that would have been blocked by an adblocker is going to have a 0% chance of converting me into a buyer. Also, most non-technical users don't even know what an adblocker is. Unless someone set one up for them they are seeing ads. It seems weird to me they would spend a lot of effort into trying to block adblockers. The audience who uses them likely has a very small chance of ever buying something because of a paid ad and a large chunk of users don't use adblockers. This whole scenario reminds me of Let's Encrypt in a way. If push comes to shove and major browser vendors like Chrome prevented adblockers something tells me some of the best minds in this space will come together and make a browser that will be technically better in every way possible.

jokoon 4y ago

why can't ublock origin work properly with this manifest v3?

Volundr 4y ago
Because the webrequest blocking API is being removed.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  The declarativeNetRequest was added which allows a similar capability without causing privacy or performance issues.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    - dang 4y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly and that's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
DeathMetal3000 4y ago
Because an advertising company (Google) designed it just for such a purpose.
- SquareWheel 4y ago
  Considering that Google's ad providers, analytics, and general services are so easily blockable in the new API, that reasoning doesn't hold water.

classified 4y ago

Good, that's why I use Firefox. Still can't help but find it strange that ads are called "content" now.

ta8903 4y ago
Ads aren't considered content, uBO is called a content blocker because it can block all kinds of DOM content and not just ads.

rejectfinite 4y ago

Good. On Windows atleast Firefox is just as fast as Chrome. Even for heavy sites like Twitch/Youtube. Ublock origin works the best, vertical tabs from extensions etc so I dont really miss any features. Maybe the Vivaldi F2 command line. Edge is still faster but its good that the default Windows browser is finally good.

rejectfinite 4y ago

Random note, but I missed the slimmer tabs from Vivaldi and Brave and the older Firefox themes. This works, its just hidden. Says unsupported but works fine in Nightly even so far. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...

rapjr9 4y ago

Pihole blocks ads for an entire network, so why does a content blocker have to be built into the browser? Can't it just be a separate app you run, outside the browser? Even if the browser is using HTTPS the URL and IP address for everything not from the site you are on is visible. The app could even run as a fake proxy. Scripts would be harder to block if they are sent encrypted, but since you can view the scripts in a browser and hence know the exact content of the script maybe it would be easy to snip them out of the encrypted stream by automatically generating signatures or formulas for what to snip for the scripts from various sites. You could even use an embedded browser in the app to decode and format the entire page, automatically determine what to snip, do the snip, and then forward the modified stream to the users primary web browser (with some delay). Any checksums could be modified appropriately. The app could present a GUI in the primary browser that the user could use to decide what to block. Are the page contents protected by a cryptographic signature? Does not seem like it would matter since the embedded browser certainly has the ability to decrypt everything. Data in the reverse direction could be sent unmodified. Maybe the slowdown caused by filtering everything this way would be unacceptable to users? Some users might find it acceptable in exchange for greater control.

timvisee 4y ago
A blocker like uBlock Origin does much more than DNS level blocking. There are many cases where that isn't enough.

styfle 4y ago

The maintainer of uBlock Origin posted a detailed comment about converting from v2 to v3 here: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-1253893421 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss... It’s really worth a read to better understand the pros and cons of this new API.