11 ms·

Mozilla solves the Manifest V3 puzzle to save ad blockers

343 points by Vinnl 4y ago

superkuh 4y ago
> Unfortunately, Google has made many decisions about the design of its new platform without taking into account the wishes and concerns of extension developers and, in the end, their own users. As a result, ad blocking extensions will lose some of their functionality. Basically the same thing that happened to Firefox extensions when they abandoned the entire old ecosystem and switched to Chrome's webextension. And now that they're stuck with that choice they're happy about mitigating even more damage to add-ons caused by it. This is not so much a win as a holding action after a bad choice.
- kibwen 4y ago
  The idea of a well-defined extensions interface is not a bad idea. In fact, it's a very good idea. For as much power the old, everything-goes extensions model gave you, it also meaningfully prevented Firefox from evolving for years. Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? Yeah, and it was that way because Mozilla couldn't change a damn thing without half of the entire extensions ecosystem imploding with every release. You need a well-defined API if you want to have any hope of improving the browser without breaking the whole world every week. Chrome had such an API, and it was popular, so Firefox lifted it. That's not nefarious, that's just smart. I'm happy that they managed to pull it off, and I'm happy that alternative browsers continue to exist in order to resist Google's death grip on the web.
  - adra 4y ago
    If they cared and their slowdowns were simply related to addons, they could always sample the overhead of said addons and show a warning. My moderate use of addons in FF didn't feel too aggressive, but then again I'm not in the clique with dozens of open windows. There were times of fast/slowness in FF. It was never bad enough to chase me off the platform, but to say the slow ess was simply saddled on addons is probably disingenuous.
    - Karellen 4y ago
      It's not that the addons were slow. It's that the architecture in Firefox that was needed to support the addons was slow - even if there were no addons in use.
    - spiffytech 4y ago
      The slowness wasn't caused (just) by slow addons. As I remember it, Firefox was unable to move to a multi-process architecture as long as old extensions were supported.
      - mook 4y ago
        My recollection was that they had some multi-process things, though the problem was that they had to keep breaking extensions as they added more and more. I believe multi-process NPAPI plugins was somewhere around 3.6 or 4? (Of course, 4 took forever to ship too… that was great for extensions though, because it meant no API breakage during that time.)
    - adjav 4y ago
      It's not that the add-ons were slow, it's that the architecture built to support those add-ons made the browser as a whole inherently slow. Everything was quite siloed, and required a series of dynamic dispatches to accomplish anything. This allowed extensions to easily change lots of core functionality, but also meant that the entire Firefox codebase had become a public API, and practically any change made would break something.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - modo_mario 4y ago
    >Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? The only part I remember where Firefox was notably slower was videos when Google led Firefox for a ring around the rosie when they singlehandedly decided to use a proprietary codec for their youtube videoplayer after first making everyone believe they were working on using a different one which FF started working on supporting. I can't count the amount of complaints i heard of firefox being slow there.
    - imbnwa 4y ago
      Is this when you had to make sure you were brute forcing the HTML5-based playback?
  - eitland 4y ago
    > Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? Except it wasn't. I used Firefox a lot on Windows and Linux and didn't have the slightest problems. The only reason I see why Chrome took over was a rather insane push, about the same level of intensity as IE6, from Google, using everything: - artificially reducing performance of Firefox on key Google properties (Google Calendar, YouTube) - bundling Chrome with Adobe - ad campaigns on the front of Google where no one else has been allowed to serve ads (this alone must have been worth billions) - lies ("switch to a better browser" they wrote even when I was using Firefox) Google needs to be punished - big time - for this abuse.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      They keep doing it: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1625756307297914883 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1625756307297914883
    - Miraste 4y ago
      Firefox was slower than other browsers at the time. A lot slower, and buggier. There are plenty of benchmarks. I’m a Firefox user now, but before Quantum I didn’t touch it because it really was terribly dated.
      - eitland 4y ago
        We might have different usage patterns. I regularly ran it with multiple extensions and 400 - 600 open tabs and didn't feel Chrome was better. And I'm the kind of person who can start a 2 hour troubleshooting session over a few tens of milliseconds unexpected lag. Edit: maybe Chrome was hopeless with multiple tabs or maybe one of the older memory saver extensions was so much better it made up for it, or maybe it just matched my hardware/SW at the time extremely well (high end HP laptops with Windows or Linux), or maybe it was just a feeling, I don't know. But I know I spent a significant part of my work day in the browsers and Firefox felt significantly better even when I wanted to try the then new and cool Chrome.
        4y ago
  - 2h 4y ago
    > The idea of a well-defined extensions interface is not a bad idea. when I am forced to register on addons.mozilla.org, just to install an extension that I wrote, yes, that is a bad idea. Give users the option to say "yes, I understand that this is not an 'approved' addon. install it anyway"
  - cxr 4y ago
    > Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? Yeah, and it was that way because Mozilla couldn't change a damn thing without half of the entire extensions ecosystem imploding with every release. This is misleading. Like wildly so. The imprimatur that the Firefox team was working under meant that they absolutely could, and very often did, break things from release-to-release. The long, slow decline related to slowness at the core of Firefox had very little to do with extensions (the unwillingness to break them, that is). The real reason is that the work needed for what was eventually delivered in the overhaul that made XUL obsolete was work of the sort that takes a long time to complete. If anyone had stumbled upon working patchsets for those goals stuff through divine revelation and had the ability to say so, then they would have broken things sooner. If anything, keeping XUL extensions around while all this work was being done helped prop up Firefox's user numbers for a while longer. (Compare to if XUL, while still technically viable, had been killed 10 years ago with a feature flag by fiat and then multiprocess, parallel rendering, and other deliverables related to Gecko Rustification were still as many years away as they actually were.)
- lapcat 4y ago
  > This is not so much a win as a holding action after a bad choice. That choice was made over 7 years ago. It may or may not have been a bad choice, but at this point Firefox is well beyond the "mitigation" phase of its previous add-on API migration. As an extension developer myself, I was happy that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all had similar implementations with Manifest V2. Now it's in a very awkward phase again.
  - foepys 4y ago
    > Now it's in a very awkward phase again. Only because we allowed a single browser engine to become a quasi-monopoly again. Google doesn't need to adhere to addon standards, Google sets them.
  - gorhill 4y ago
    > It may or may not have been a bad choice It was a necessary choice, the previous framework for extensions was not multiprocess-compatible.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    you can not have both competition in the browser market, and every browser being the exact same all the time... I prefer less monopoly and more competition
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > you can not have both competition in the browser market, and every browser being the exact same all the time... Are you claiming that there can't be such a thing as web standards? HTML? Why would an extension standard be any different from an HTML standard?
      - account42 4y ago
        Web standards should specify the semantics of HTML, CSS, etc, not dictate how exactly the browser operates. Limiting extensibility of all browsers just because there is some webextensions standard is ridiculous. Similarly, browsers should be able to ignore user-hostile parts of specs like the HSTS spec trying to dictate that users cannot override the certificate validitation. In fact, even how websites are rendered should ultimately be up to how the user has configured his browser even if some spec says otherwise. This includes being able to install effective ad blockers that remove elements and deny requests that should be there according to the standard. Think of web standards more as the definition of a common language between websites and browsers and not as a rulebook for either.
hypothesis 4y ago
Basically they had to rewrite everything just to get the same functionality? What a giant waste of everyone’s time… which is probably one of bigCo goals: keep churning, so that people with less bandwidth are forced to deal with churn instead of improving their product.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- taeric 4y ago
  I mean... Valid criticism in many ways. But also not something that is unique to the big companies. Or computers, for that matter. And there is a chance we can take learnings from the last attempt and improve in them.
- pancrufty 4y ago
  That wasn’t the intention obviously. You may call it shortsighted, but they certainly wanted to kill the old platform and start fresh. Only now we know that wasn’t as easy. In reality we should be thankful that it hasn’t happened (yet) rather than bashing the choice to keep MV2 around longer. They could very easily pull the trigger, I don’t think many will actually switch to Firefox just for that. Most won’t even know. As a product manager, I don’t know what they’re waiting for exactly.
TrianguloY 4y ago
And how did Firefox solved it? I only found it mentioning that Firefox will continue to support V2, but that's not a solution.
- johnny22 4y ago
  they're supporting manifest v3 fully, but not removing the thing that breaks the better content filtering.
- dmix 4y ago
  It's explained here https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-firefox-recap-next-steps/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi... And here https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/10/31/begin-your-mv3-migration-by-implementing-new-features-today/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/10/31/begin-your-mv3-mi... Firefox kept support for Event Pages which get direct access to DOM and WebAPIs in the background as well as Web Requests, both of which are not available via Chrome's use of service workers/restricted request API > “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.” I hope FF gets service workers going soon, I haven't followed development closely so I'm not sure what's holding them back besides not wanting to replace Event Pages entirely with it [1]. I tried to build a (non-complicated) extension recently and the service worker API seemed cleaner and modern. 1 https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72 https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72
  - 4y ago
ravenstine 4y ago
What's even the point of disabling Manifest v2 in Firefox? Is there something wrong with it or that significantly different that Firefox can't support aspects of both v2 and v3? Having just made a Manifest v3 extension for Chrome, I don't really see how it's so wildly different that Firefox would have to do that much to support it. What am I missing? The world of software sure is good at "fixing" things that aren't broke. Also, this article doesn't seem to make it clear what Firefox is doing to "save" ad blockers other than continue to support Manifest v2. If they're making ad blocking possible with v3, there doesn't seem to be a lot of detail around it. Yes, I can go research it, but the point of articles like these should be to aggregate that information so people don't have to do all the work for themselves.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- whstl 4y ago
  The problem is that Google removed a very important API that is crucial for ad blockers. They did that change along with the update to Manifest V3. Mozilla is trying to do the right thing by implementing Manifest V3 without the problem introduced by Google. It will "save" ad-blockers by not removing a specific API that is important for them. Firefox will keep supporting both V2 and V3. They want to implement V3 in order to avoid forcing most developers to have different manifests for different browsers. This is a good thing in general. If you want details on what Mozilla is doing, here's a snippet from the linked blog post: > While other browser vendors introduced declarativeNetRequest (DNR) in favor of blocking Web Request in MV3, Firefox MV3 continues to support blocking Web Request and will support a compatible version of DNR in the future. We believe blocking Web Request is more flexible than DNR, thus allowing for more creative use cases in content blockers and other privacy and security extensions. However, DNR also has important performance and compatibility characteristics we want to support. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signing-available-november-21-on-firefox-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signi...
- pancrufty 4y ago
  Chrome has a hard wall around some features like chrome.scripting and promised APIs (MV3-only) but Firefox doesn’t. It seems that Firefox is keeping around the same MV2 APIs so Firefox extensions will eventually be able to update the MV number with no effort.
whstl 4y ago
The important information referenced in the current article by AdGuard is in this link by Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signing-available-november-21-on-firefox-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signi... Posting it here since there's a lot of questions being asked here in HN that are answered by the post.
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, we've switched to that URL from https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adblocking.html https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adbloc.... Thanks! I guess we'll keep that article's title though (in de-baited form) because "Manifest v3 signing available November 21 on Firefox Nightly" would trigger weird responses. Edit: nope, reverted. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34851017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34851017.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    AdGuard article contains this : Acknowledging these apprehensions, Mozilla announced last year that Firefox would continue to support the webRequest API to block entire categories of HTTP requests in its implementation of Manifest V3... And, per AdGuard, is now shipping that.
butz 4y ago
It would be even better if they wouldn't force unnecessary and unremovable "Extensions" button on toolbar.
shadowgovt 4y ago
So what did Mozilla actually do here? The blog post never gets to the point.
- dang 4y ago
  We've changed the URL from https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adblocking.html https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adbloc... to the older blog post suggested by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850531 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850753. Does that help? Edit, ok we'll revert it. Sorry all!
  - lapcat 4y ago
    No? The submission was for a blog post from 2 days ago by AdGuard, and now you've made it into a blog post by Mozilla from last year. That's a pretty extreme change. The Mozilla blog post gives some background, so why not just post that link instead of changing the whole submission? This was a mistake, dang. Not to mention it doesn't have (2022). Which it didn't need, before you changed the link. The AdGuard blog post has details that the Mozilla post doesn't, such as a specific discussion about ad blocking, as well as recent developments in Chrome's deprecation timeline.
    - nixass 4y ago
      I've seen some pretty weird submission alterations recently, not sure what's purpose of that. I know there's tendency to have information linked to as close to original source as possible but it's just complete miss sometimes
      - dang 4y ago
        We haven't changed anything about how we edit titles or URLs—all these practices have been stable for many years. So if you've noticed weirder changes lately, it must just be luck of the draw. I obviously got this change wrong since people hated it so much - but no one much liked the original URL either (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850937). If there's a better article, we can change it again.
morelinks 4y ago
uBlock Origin Lite has been a good solution this far. It might not be as robust as uBlock Origin, but I fear less for the future that it’s here.
- donio 4y ago
  If you don't mind the drastically reduced feature set[1]. It works if you were using nothing but default settings but if you want custom filters or anything else that's not included in the bundled filter list then you are SOL. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1067als/eli5_ublock_lite_vs_ublock_origin/j3h00xj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1067als/eli5_...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
parhamn 4y ago
A bit off topic but, but as a person who develops an extension and browser, another puzzle we need to solve is how to control and transparently log what these extensions are doing with your data. Cookie, storage, exported DOM reads, fetch requests, etc should all be logged in clear text (maybe even pass handlers that pull reduced data) for the user to audit. It blows my mind what any developer can do with extension apis. "This site can access data on this site" warning is not enough.
- themerone 4y ago
  Malicious extensions will defeat the logging by injecting scripts into the dom.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  The truth is Manifest V3 is a step in the right direction in that regard. It forces extensions to declare what they want done so the browser can do it directly without exposing user data. This is the right choice for 99% of extensions out there. It's just that uBlock Origin is so important and trusted that it should be an exception. There should be no limits on uBlock Origin at all. It's so important that it should just be turned into an actual built-in browser feature, and the only reason it isn't is the massive conflicts of interests involved since all major browsers are backed by adtech profits.
  - modzu 4y ago
    isn't that basically what brave did?
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      And then some. Brave is a polarizing project.
      - WeylandYutani 4y ago
        I refuse anything or anyone involved with crypto.
2h 4y ago
FYI Android Firefox, since version 68, only allows installation of addons that are on a certain whitelist. For custom extensions, they require you to register on addons.mozilla.org, even if you just want to install an extension you wrote yourself.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Yes? Nothing to do with manifest v3? Also, better than any other browser on Android. Chrome allows no addons. Samsung internet and Edge only has Adblock Plus. Brave, Opera and Vivaldi has its own built-in adblockers. There is Kiwi browser and Bromite but those where way behind on Chromium versions last I checked. On android and IOS I would use Brave and/or Firefox.
  - 2h 4y ago
    saying Firefox is "better than any other browser on Android" might be true, but it still doesn't make a forced whitelist acceptable. Users should be able to accept the risk and install untrusted addons with a warning. Again, if its an addon that I wrote myself, I should not need Mozilla's approval to install that on my own device.
wkat4242 4y ago
They did just kill bypass-paywalls-clean though. On desktop you can sideload it but on mobile you can't. They're not in my good books for a while. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774950
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  The add-on got DMCA claimed. Until the creator counter claims, they have to take it down.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - account42 4y ago
    As horrible as the DMCA is, it does not mean that Mozilla or any other hoster has to honor any claim anyone thinks up. If they are confident that a claim is frivolous they can just tell the submitter to fuck off. It does mean that they take on some liability of the claim turns out to be valid but again, they can determine that themselves and there isn't any abosolute safety from having to defend yourself against invalid legal claims in either case. Mozilla trying to benefit from extension creators (which provide immense value to the browser) while trying to offload all legal risk to the little guy is not exactly making me more confident that they are all that interested in protecting the open internet. Now I haven't seen this claim specifically (has Mozilla posted it publicly?) but I doub the extension is actually infringing anyones copyright and this is instead about providing a way to circumvent coyright protections. AFAIK DMCA circumvention is not grounds for a DMCA complaint, which are for direct infringement of the claimants "IP" only.
fIREpOK 4y ago
Also why on Firefox Mobile, do you still have to enable developer mode AND create add-on collections to be able to install the add-ons you need? It's just a pain to have to do that every time you install Firefox. It's been possible for maybe 2 years on Nightly.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  How often do you install Firefox?
  - fIREpOK 4y ago
    Not very often but it's an annoyance and I always forget how to do it when the time comes, so I have to web search it.
  - Zuiii 4y ago
    I don't care. I'm not going to create an account on some website just to install addons on my OWN browser. Period. Firefox will continue to bleed users like me who don't know how to dance this stupid dance or refuse to do so until it completely collapses. I wonder why mozilla chose this hill in particular to die on.
charcircuit 4y ago
Manifest v3 didn't kill ah blockers. It just got rid of the webRequestBlocking API and replaced it with declarativeNetRequest. This mean you don't have to give ad blockers permission to see all of the requests you are making. Ad blockers can still dynamically create rules for what requests they want to block.
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
  [dead]
- zarzavat 4y ago
  I want to give my ad blocker permission to see my requests. I trust gorhill implicitly, moreover the code to ubo open source. Ad blocking is a cat and mouse game. Google, a mouse, is trying to cripple the cat enough that they can squeak all of their ads through. It is a fucked up situation when the attacker, i.e. Google, who does record everybody's history, is trying to convince us that our security will be enhanced if they stop allowing us to run our security software on our own devices. And that the open source security software is actually the attacker, with no evidence of that assertion whatsoever! The word "gaslighting" is thrown around frequently but what Google is doing here comes close to that. Google knows that crippling ad blockers will result in more privacy violation, but they keep pushing this lie that ublock is dangerous and anti-privacy because they want to line their pockets.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    >I trust gorhill implicitly Your comment made me take a closer look at what Raymond does and his twitter wasn't a positive surprise, it's full of political propaganda a lot of it anti-US and pro Putin/CCP. For example he shares Caitlin Johnstone tweets, which is a pro China account that might be known to people who follow what goes on in the sinosphere. Doesn't say anything about his code of course, but it's also not a sign to me this person should be trusted unconditionally. In general, there should be as little trust as possible. I expect my browser to ideally restrict extensions maximally and only give the permissions I explicitely agree to. The goes for open source code as well, there can always be a bug or exploit that hasn't been found yet. https://nitter.namazso.eu/gorhill https://nitter.namazso.eu/gorhill
anfilt 4y ago
Just bring back XUL based extensions. I miss how customizable firefox was during those days.
- tragiclos 4y ago
  I don’t disagree that XUL was great for it’s time, but this offers some interesting perspective on the reasons for its demise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  There are many forks for that, not a problem.
deleted 4y ago
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r2222 4y ago
How does Manifest v3 compare to Safari content blocker API in terms of ad blocking capability? Currently AdGuard for Safari (from Mac App Store, the one that uses native content blocking API) has 7 content blockers categories you have to enable, and each of them allow 150k rules, amounting to over a million rules total although you can’t count it like that really. V3’s 30k per extension and 330k total sounds like a lot less. Is there something more to it than just the amount of rules, is v3 still better than Safari?

343 points by Vinnl 4y ago

> Unfortunately, Google has made many decisions about the design of its new platform without taking into account the wishes and concerns of extension developers and, in the end, their own users. As a result, ad blocking extensions will lose some of their functionality. Basically the same thing that happened to Firefox extensions when they abandoned the entire old ecosystem and switched to Chrome's webextension. And now that they're stuck with that choice they're happy about mitigating even more damage to add-ons caused by it. This is not so much a win as a holding action after a bad choice.

kibwen 4y ago
The idea of a well-defined extensions interface is not a bad idea. In fact, it's a very good idea. For as much power the old, everything-goes extensions model gave you, it also meaningfully prevented Firefox from evolving for years. Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? Yeah, and it was that way because Mozilla couldn't change a damn thing without half of the entire extensions ecosystem imploding with every release. You need a well-defined API if you want to have any hope of improving the browser without breaking the whole world every week. Chrome had such an API, and it was popular, so Firefox lifted it. That's not nefarious, that's just smart. I'm happy that they managed to pull it off, and I'm happy that alternative browsers continue to exist in order to resist Google's death grip on the web.
- adra 4y ago
  If they cared and their slowdowns were simply related to addons, they could always sample the overhead of said addons and show a warning. My moderate use of addons in FF didn't feel too aggressive, but then again I'm not in the clique with dozens of open windows. There were times of fast/slowness in FF. It was never bad enough to chase me off the platform, but to say the slow ess was simply saddled on addons is probably disingenuous.
  - Karellen 4y ago
    It's not that the addons were slow. It's that the architecture in Firefox that was needed to support the addons was slow - even if there were no addons in use.
  - spiffytech 4y ago
    The slowness wasn't caused (just) by slow addons. As I remember it, Firefox was unable to move to a multi-process architecture as long as old extensions were supported.
    - mook 4y ago
      My recollection was that they had some multi-process things, though the problem was that they had to keep breaking extensions as they added more and more. I believe multi-process NPAPI plugins was somewhere around 3.6 or 4? (Of course, 4 took forever to ship too… that was great for extensions though, because it meant no API breakage during that time.)
  - adjav 4y ago
    It's not that the add-ons were slow, it's that the architecture built to support those add-ons made the browser as a whole inherently slow. Everything was quite siloed, and required a series of dynamic dispatches to accomplish anything. This allowed extensions to easily change lots of core functionality, but also meant that the entire Firefox codebase had become a public API, and practically any change made would break something.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- modo_mario 4y ago
  >Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? The only part I remember where Firefox was notably slower was videos when Google led Firefox for a ring around the rosie when they singlehandedly decided to use a proprietary codec for their youtube videoplayer after first making everyone believe they were working on using a different one which FF started working on supporting. I can't count the amount of complaints i heard of firefox being slow there.
  - imbnwa 4y ago
    Is this when you had to make sure you were brute forcing the HTML5-based playback?
- eitland 4y ago
  > Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? Except it wasn't. I used Firefox a lot on Windows and Linux and didn't have the slightest problems. The only reason I see why Chrome took over was a rather insane push, about the same level of intensity as IE6, from Google, using everything: - artificially reducing performance of Firefox on key Google properties (Google Calendar, YouTube) - bundling Chrome with Adobe - ad campaigns on the front of Google where no one else has been allowed to serve ads (this alone must have been worth billions) - lies ("switch to a better browser" they wrote even when I was using Firefox) Google needs to be punished - big time - for this abuse.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    They keep doing it: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1625756307297914883 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1625756307297914883
  - Miraste 4y ago
    Firefox was slower than other browsers at the time. A lot slower, and buggier. There are plenty of benchmarks. I’m a Firefox user now, but before Quantum I didn’t touch it because it really was terribly dated.
    - eitland 4y ago
      We might have different usage patterns. I regularly ran it with multiple extensions and 400 - 600 open tabs and didn't feel Chrome was better. And I'm the kind of person who can start a 2 hour troubleshooting session over a few tens of milliseconds unexpected lag. Edit: maybe Chrome was hopeless with multiple tabs or maybe one of the older memory saver extensions was so much better it made up for it, or maybe it just matched my hardware/SW at the time extremely well (high end HP laptops with Windows or Linux), or maybe it was just a feeling, I don't know. But I know I spent a significant part of my work day in the browsers and Firefox felt significantly better even when I wanted to try the then new and cool Chrome.
      - 4y ago
- 2h 4y ago
  > The idea of a well-defined extensions interface is not a bad idea. when I am forced to register on addons.mozilla.org, just to install an extension that I wrote, yes, that is a bad idea. Give users the option to say "yes, I understand that this is not an 'approved' addon. install it anyway"
- cxr 4y ago
  > Remember that decade where Firefox shed market share to Chrome for being too "slow" and "bloated"? Yeah, and it was that way because Mozilla couldn't change a damn thing without half of the entire extensions ecosystem imploding with every release. This is misleading. Like wildly so. The imprimatur that the Firefox team was working under meant that they absolutely could, and very often did, break things from release-to-release. The long, slow decline related to slowness at the core of Firefox had very little to do with extensions (the unwillingness to break them, that is). The real reason is that the work needed for what was eventually delivered in the overhaul that made XUL obsolete was work of the sort that takes a long time to complete. If anyone had stumbled upon working patchsets for those goals stuff through divine revelation and had the ability to say so, then they would have broken things sooner. If anything, keeping XUL extensions around while all this work was being done helped prop up Firefox's user numbers for a while longer. (Compare to if XUL, while still technically viable, had been killed 10 years ago with a feature flag by fiat and then multiprocess, parallel rendering, and other deliverables related to Gecko Rustification were still as many years away as they actually were.)
lapcat 4y ago
> This is not so much a win as a holding action after a bad choice. That choice was made over 7 years ago. It may or may not have been a bad choice, but at this point Firefox is well beyond the "mitigation" phase of its previous add-on API migration. As an extension developer myself, I was happy that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all had similar implementations with Manifest V2. Now it's in a very awkward phase again.
- foepys 4y ago
  > Now it's in a very awkward phase again. Only because we allowed a single browser engine to become a quasi-monopoly again. Google doesn't need to adhere to addon standards, Google sets them.
- gorhill 4y ago
  > It may or may not have been a bad choice It was a necessary choice, the previous framework for extensions was not multiprocess-compatible.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  you can not have both competition in the browser market, and every browser being the exact same all the time... I prefer less monopoly and more competition
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > you can not have both competition in the browser market, and every browser being the exact same all the time... Are you claiming that there can't be such a thing as web standards? HTML? Why would an extension standard be any different from an HTML standard?
    - account42 4y ago
      Web standards should specify the semantics of HTML, CSS, etc, not dictate how exactly the browser operates. Limiting extensibility of all browsers just because there is some webextensions standard is ridiculous. Similarly, browsers should be able to ignore user-hostile parts of specs like the HSTS spec trying to dictate that users cannot override the certificate validitation. In fact, even how websites are rendered should ultimately be up to how the user has configured his browser even if some spec says otherwise. This includes being able to install effective ad blockers that remove elements and deny requests that should be there according to the standard. Think of web standards more as the definition of a common language between websites and browsers and not as a rulebook for either.

hypothesis 4y ago

Basically they had to rewrite everything just to get the same functionality? What a giant waste of everyone’s time… which is probably one of bigCo goals: keep churning, so that people with less bandwidth are forced to deal with churn instead of improving their product.

deleted 4y ago
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taeric 4y ago
I mean... Valid criticism in many ways. But also not something that is unique to the big companies. Or computers, for that matter. And there is a chance we can take learnings from the last attempt and improve in them.
pancrufty 4y ago
That wasn’t the intention obviously. You may call it shortsighted, but they certainly wanted to kill the old platform and start fresh. Only now we know that wasn’t as easy. In reality we should be thankful that it hasn’t happened (yet) rather than bashing the choice to keep MV2 around longer. They could very easily pull the trigger, I don’t think many will actually switch to Firefox just for that. Most won’t even know. As a product manager, I don’t know what they’re waiting for exactly.

TrianguloY 4y ago

And how did Firefox solved it? I only found it mentioning that Firefox will continue to support V2, but that's not a solution.

johnny22 4y ago
they're supporting manifest v3 fully, but not removing the thing that breaks the better content filtering.
dmix 4y ago
It's explained here https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-firefox-recap-next-steps/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi... And here https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/10/31/begin-your-mv3-migration-by-implementing-new-features-today/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/10/31/begin-your-mv3-mi... Firefox kept support for Event Pages which get direct access to DOM and WebAPIs in the background as well as Web Requests, both of which are not available via Chrome's use of service workers/restricted request API > “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.” I hope FF gets service workers going soon, I haven't followed development closely so I'm not sure what's holding them back besides not wanting to replace Event Pages entirely with it [1]. I tried to build a (non-complicated) extension recently and the service worker API seemed cleaner and modern. 1 https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72 https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72
- 4y ago

ravenstine 4y ago

What's even the point of disabling Manifest v2 in Firefox? Is there something wrong with it or that significantly different that Firefox can't support aspects of both v2 and v3? Having just made a Manifest v3 extension for Chrome, I don't really see how it's so wildly different that Firefox would have to do that much to support it. What am I missing? The world of software sure is good at "fixing" things that aren't broke. Also, this article doesn't seem to make it clear what Firefox is doing to "save" ad blockers other than continue to support Manifest v2. If they're making ad blocking possible with v3, there doesn't seem to be a lot of detail around it. Yes, I can go research it, but the point of articles like these should be to aggregate that information so people don't have to do all the work for themselves.

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whstl 4y ago
The problem is that Google removed a very important API that is crucial for ad blockers. They did that change along with the update to Manifest V3. Mozilla is trying to do the right thing by implementing Manifest V3 without the problem introduced by Google. It will "save" ad-blockers by not removing a specific API that is important for them. Firefox will keep supporting both V2 and V3. They want to implement V3 in order to avoid forcing most developers to have different manifests for different browsers. This is a good thing in general. If you want details on what Mozilla is doing, here's a snippet from the linked blog post: > While other browser vendors introduced declarativeNetRequest (DNR) in favor of blocking Web Request in MV3, Firefox MV3 continues to support blocking Web Request and will support a compatible version of DNR in the future. We believe blocking Web Request is more flexible than DNR, thus allowing for more creative use cases in content blockers and other privacy and security extensions. However, DNR also has important performance and compatibility characteristics we want to support. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signing-available-november-21-on-firefox-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signi...
pancrufty 4y ago
Chrome has a hard wall around some features like chrome.scripting and promised APIs (MV3-only) but Firefox doesn’t. It seems that Firefox is keeping around the same MV2 APIs so Firefox extensions will eventually be able to update the MV number with no effort.

whstl 4y ago

The important information referenced in the current article by AdGuard is in this link by Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signing-available-november-21-on-firefox-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/manifest-v3-signi... Posting it here since there's a lot of questions being asked here in HN that are answered by the post.

dang 4y ago
Ok, we've switched to that URL from https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adblocking.html https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adbloc.... Thanks! I guess we'll keep that article's title though (in de-baited form) because "Manifest v3 signing available November 21 on Firefox Nightly" would trigger weird responses. Edit: nope, reverted. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34851017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34851017.
- Terretta 4y ago
  AdGuard article contains this : Acknowledging these apprehensions, Mozilla announced last year that Firefox would continue to support the webRequest API to block entire categories of HTTP requests in its implementation of Manifest V3... And, per AdGuard, is now shipping that.

butz 4y ago

It would be even better if they wouldn't force unnecessary and unremovable "Extensions" button on toolbar.

shadowgovt 4y ago

So what did Mozilla actually do here? The blog post never gets to the point.

dang 4y ago
We've changed the URL from https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adblocking.html https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adbloc... to the older blog post suggested by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850531 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850753. Does that help? Edit, ok we'll revert it. Sorry all!
- lapcat 4y ago
  No? The submission was for a blog post from 2 days ago by AdGuard, and now you've made it into a blog post by Mozilla from last year. That's a pretty extreme change. The Mozilla blog post gives some background, so why not just post that link instead of changing the whole submission? This was a mistake, dang. Not to mention it doesn't have (2022). Which it didn't need, before you changed the link. The AdGuard blog post has details that the Mozilla post doesn't, such as a specific discussion about ad blocking, as well as recent developments in Chrome's deprecation timeline.
  - nixass 4y ago
    I've seen some pretty weird submission alterations recently, not sure what's purpose of that. I know there's tendency to have information linked to as close to original source as possible but it's just complete miss sometimes
    - dang 4y ago
      We haven't changed anything about how we edit titles or URLs—all these practices have been stable for many years. So if you've noticed weirder changes lately, it must just be luck of the draw. I obviously got this change wrong since people hated it so much - but no one much liked the original URL either (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850937). If there's a better article, we can change it again.

morelinks 4y ago

uBlock Origin Lite has been a good solution this far. It might not be as robust as uBlock Origin, but I fear less for the future that it’s here.

donio 4y ago
If you don't mind the drastically reduced feature set[1]. It works if you were using nothing but default settings but if you want custom filters or anything else that's not included in the bundled filter list then you are SOL. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1067als/eli5_ublock_lite_vs_ublock_origin/j3h00xj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1067als/eli5_...

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parhamn 4y ago

A bit off topic but, but as a person who develops an extension and browser, another puzzle we need to solve is how to control and transparently log what these extensions are doing with your data. Cookie, storage, exported DOM reads, fetch requests, etc should all be logged in clear text (maybe even pass handlers that pull reduced data) for the user to audit. It blows my mind what any developer can do with extension apis. "This site can access data on this site" warning is not enough.

themerone 4y ago
Malicious extensions will defeat the logging by injecting scripts into the dom.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
The truth is Manifest V3 is a step in the right direction in that regard. It forces extensions to declare what they want done so the browser can do it directly without exposing user data. This is the right choice for 99% of extensions out there. It's just that uBlock Origin is so important and trusted that it should be an exception. There should be no limits on uBlock Origin at all. It's so important that it should just be turned into an actual built-in browser feature, and the only reason it isn't is the massive conflicts of interests involved since all major browsers are backed by adtech profits.
- modzu 4y ago
  isn't that basically what brave did?
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    And then some. Brave is a polarizing project.
    - WeylandYutani 4y ago
      I refuse anything or anyone involved with crypto.

2h 4y ago

FYI Android Firefox, since version 68, only allows installation of addons that are on a certain whitelist. For custom extensions, they require you to register on addons.mozilla.org, even if you just want to install an extension you wrote yourself.

rejectfinite 4y ago
Yes? Nothing to do with manifest v3? Also, better than any other browser on Android. Chrome allows no addons. Samsung internet and Edge only has Adblock Plus. Brave, Opera and Vivaldi has its own built-in adblockers. There is Kiwi browser and Bromite but those where way behind on Chromium versions last I checked. On android and IOS I would use Brave and/or Firefox.
- 2h 4y ago
  saying Firefox is "better than any other browser on Android" might be true, but it still doesn't make a forced whitelist acceptable. Users should be able to accept the risk and install untrusted addons with a warning. Again, if its an addon that I wrote myself, I should not need Mozilla's approval to install that on my own device.

wkat4242 4y ago

They did just kill bypass-paywalls-clean though. On desktop you can sideload it but on mobile you can't. They're not in my good books for a while. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774950

boomboomsubban 4y ago
The add-on got DMCA claimed. Until the creator counter claims, they have to take it down.
- deleted 4y ago
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- account42 4y ago
  As horrible as the DMCA is, it does not mean that Mozilla or any other hoster has to honor any claim anyone thinks up. If they are confident that a claim is frivolous they can just tell the submitter to fuck off. It does mean that they take on some liability of the claim turns out to be valid but again, they can determine that themselves and there isn't any abosolute safety from having to defend yourself against invalid legal claims in either case. Mozilla trying to benefit from extension creators (which provide immense value to the browser) while trying to offload all legal risk to the little guy is not exactly making me more confident that they are all that interested in protecting the open internet. Now I haven't seen this claim specifically (has Mozilla posted it publicly?) but I doub the extension is actually infringing anyones copyright and this is instead about providing a way to circumvent coyright protections. AFAIK DMCA circumvention is not grounds for a DMCA complaint, which are for direct infringement of the claimants "IP" only.

fIREpOK 4y ago

Also why on Firefox Mobile, do you still have to enable developer mode AND create add-on collections to be able to install the add-ons you need? It's just a pain to have to do that every time you install Firefox. It's been possible for maybe 2 years on Nightly.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
How often do you install Firefox?
- fIREpOK 4y ago
  Not very often but it's an annoyance and I always forget how to do it when the time comes, so I have to web search it.
- Zuiii 4y ago
  I don't care. I'm not going to create an account on some website just to install addons on my OWN browser. Period. Firefox will continue to bleed users like me who don't know how to dance this stupid dance or refuse to do so until it completely collapses. I wonder why mozilla chose this hill in particular to die on.

charcircuit 4y ago

Manifest v3 didn't kill ah blockers. It just got rid of the webRequestBlocking API and replaced it with declarativeNetRequest. This mean you don't have to give ad blockers permission to see all of the requests you are making. Ad blockers can still dynamically create rules for what requests they want to block.

MrStonedOne 4y ago
[dead]
zarzavat 4y ago
I want to give my ad blocker permission to see my requests. I trust gorhill implicitly, moreover the code to ubo open source. Ad blocking is a cat and mouse game. Google, a mouse, is trying to cripple the cat enough that they can squeak all of their ads through. It is a fucked up situation when the attacker, i.e. Google, who does record everybody's history, is trying to convince us that our security will be enhanced if they stop allowing us to run our security software on our own devices. And that the open source security software is actually the attacker, with no evidence of that assertion whatsoever! The word "gaslighting" is thrown around frequently but what Google is doing here comes close to that. Google knows that crippling ad blockers will result in more privacy violation, but they keep pushing this lie that ublock is dangerous and anti-privacy because they want to line their pockets.
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  >I trust gorhill implicitly Your comment made me take a closer look at what Raymond does and his twitter wasn't a positive surprise, it's full of political propaganda a lot of it anti-US and pro Putin/CCP. For example he shares Caitlin Johnstone tweets, which is a pro China account that might be known to people who follow what goes on in the sinosphere. Doesn't say anything about his code of course, but it's also not a sign to me this person should be trusted unconditionally. In general, there should be as little trust as possible. I expect my browser to ideally restrict extensions maximally and only give the permissions I explicitely agree to. The goes for open source code as well, there can always be a bug or exploit that hasn't been found yet. https://nitter.namazso.eu/gorhill https://nitter.namazso.eu/gorhill

anfilt 4y ago

Just bring back XUL based extensions. I miss how customizable firefox was during those days.

tragiclos 4y ago
I don’t disagree that XUL was great for it’s time, but this offers some interesting perspective on the reasons for its demise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017
kubanczyk 4y ago
There are many forks for that, not a problem.

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r2222 4y ago

How does Manifest v3 compare to Safari content blocker API in terms of ad blocking capability? Currently AdGuard for Safari (from Mac App Store, the one that uses native content blocking API) has 7 content blockers categories you have to enable, and each of them allow 150k rules, amounting to over a million rules total although you can’t count it like that really. V3’s 30k per extension and 330k total sounds like a lot less. Is there something more to it than just the amount of rules, is v3 still better than Safari?