8 ms·

Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers

291 points by speckx 5mo ago

Recent and related: Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 - June 2026 (450 comments)

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970
- GeekyBear 5mo ago
  "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension" really doesn't tell a general audience what is happening here. No wonder it gained little notice.
  - neves 5mo ago
    The current title is a lot better.
    - rafram 5mo ago
      You mean the title of this post? It's much worse, in my opinion - plenty of strong ad blockers run on MV3. Even the developer of uBlock Origin (Lite) seems to have conceded that the MV3 approach is less resource intensive and didn't require sacrificing any of the features that 99.9% of users use.
      - deafpolygon 5mo ago
        Do you have a source for this ?
      - neves 5mo ago
        MV2 and MV3 is completely uninteresting for me. But you'll have to take my advblocker from my dead cold hands
  - bcye 5mo ago
    Neither does MV3 close the door on ad blockers. This title seems like gigantic clickbait.
  - dang 5mo ago
    There have been quite a few threads about it recently - unfortunately I don't have time to dig up links at the moment. (also, 450+ comments is not little notice!)
    - ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
      Previous link is referenced in this submission as a source, and was updated with the same info that was included in this submission. Same discussion.
    - GeekyBear 5mo ago
      For an abuse of monopoly power this big, I would argue that only getting ~400 upvotes is indeed little notice.
neves 5mo ago
Will Brave, which is based in Chromium, still block ads? Since they are changing Chromium, I don't think so.
- kgwxd 5mo ago
  The ones Brave choose to block, sure. You're going to end up with the same problem eventually.
  - Izmaki 5mo ago
    In my experience they're sometimes a little too aggressive and I have to disable the "shields" for the page to function correctly. I have never seen an add while using Brave and that's after 1.5 million trackers blocked and 50 gb bandwidth "saved". The only browser I would switch to away from Brave is one that, as was described by another user in here, sandboxes all pages/domains and ensures that no data leaks outside unless you are actively allowing it. Think Qubes OS but for browsers. I imagine a nice "drag this domain-box into the Facebook domain blob of a tree structure to allow linking and sharing of data" would be a cool feature. That would make it easy to select and confirm which FAANG company gets your data on which domain.
- Cider9986 5mo ago
  Pretty sure Brave shields isn't based on an extension API so it shouldn't be affected. Have people actually noticed worse performance from uBlock Origin lite? This article isn't nuanced enough. Ad blockers will continue to work.
  - charcircuit 5mo ago
    I mostly use ublock origin light on my work laptop for YouTube and I've never seen an ad.
  - wirybeige 5mo ago
    I have noticed it to be slightly worse, mostly on "bad" sites. Just using Brave at this point though.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
ramijames 5mo ago
Use Firefox. It's an excellent browser and needs your support.
- esskay 5mo ago
  Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering), and you dont have to take my word for it, a web search for something like 'firefox sluggish compared to chrome' will back this up too as I've tried switching multiple times but always end up back on a chromium variant because the firefox ui just doesn't feel like an upgrade. Personally I've just given up trying with firefox and I now put up with brave - its certainly not perfect but at least the ad blocker isnt about to break.
  - lenkite 5mo ago
    I believe Firefox without ads is faster & safer than Chrome with Ads.
  - ramijames 5mo ago
    Not using adware seems like a big upgrade to me.
  - aleksandrm 5mo ago
    Not in my experience. Never had issues with FF feeling sluggish at all.
    - dawnerd 5mo ago
      Only place I feel it slow is on Google Meet and clickup.
      - wpm 5mo ago
        Almost as if it's on purpose
      - sheept 5mo ago
charcircuit 5mo ago
This is not true. There are other APIs extensions can use to block ads and browsers like Brave have ad blocking built into the engine itself.
xienze 5mo ago
It's obviously not perfect but DNS-level ad blockers like Pihole or Adguard Home still make a dramatic difference, so all is not lost.
- muvlon 5mo ago
  If Google ever decides to "close the door" on these too, all they need to do is make Chrome always use DoH instead of classic DNS.
  - lemagedurage 5mo ago
    I don't think this would fly between enterprise usage of custom DNS, captive portals, privacy protection etc
  - drnick1 5mo ago
    Do you mean that that Chrome would force users to use 8.8.8.8 as DNS provider? I don't think this would be acceptable or accepted.
  - EbNar 5mo ago
    You can block DoH by blacklisting their domains (which is what ControlD and NextDNS do, by the way).
- kgwxd 5mo ago
  Leaving Chrome is 1000x easier than maintaining that.
throwatdem12311 5mo ago
Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives. Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking. Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.
- OptionOfT 5mo ago
  And sadly, Firefox on iOS is the only browser that doesn't have a the possibility to run an Adblocker. Safari can run uBlock Origin. Brave had one built-in. Hell, even Edge has Adblock Plus. Does Mozilla have a contract with Google to not build one in as part of the search contract?
  - aleqs 5mo ago
    Firefox on Android supports ublock, not sure why it wouldn't support it on iOS
    - jmcphers 5mo ago
      It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. Firefox on iOS is just a skinned version of WebKit/Safari. See 2.5.6: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#performance https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...
      - CharlesW 5mo ago
        > It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. That's incorrect, and Firefox doesn't blame Apple for this. Many 3rd-party iOS browsers do ad blocking natively and/or via extensions. https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/ios https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/ios
      - dwaite 5mo ago
        This is not the cause though - other third-party browsers on iOS can do ad-blocking, and also can use system-installed extensions. They could also launch an alternative browser engine for iOS and iPadOS in the EU.
insanitybit 5mo ago
tl;dr MV2 is going away (after already being deprecated a while ago). MV3 exists, you're probably already using it in your adblocker.
whitepoplar 5mo ago
A lot of people have been very vocal about this. I use uBlock Origin Lite and haven't noticed a difference between it and uBlock Origin. Am I missing something?
- Legend2440 5mo ago
  Same. I'm still not seeing ads. I've realized over time that people on the internet love finding things to be mad about, because raging against evil is fun. They'll make up an injustice if they can't find one today.
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    They’re not “making up an injustice.” Google is actively trying to stop ad blocking, this is a fact. You can argue whether or not it’s as severe as some people make it sound or whether people should be upset at all (I think we should be), but let’s not act like this was made up whole cloth.
    - charcircuit 5mo ago
      I've seen some teams in YouTube try and stop ad blocking, but I haven't seen Google, or more importantly Chromium try and stop it.
      - Forgeties79 5mo ago
        1) YouTube is owned by Google and their entire revenue model is in alignment with how Google does things, which ublock origin interferes with. 2) Manifest v3 is Google’s, not YouTube’s, project.
        charcircuit 5mo ago
        Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blockers. In fact the chromium team worked together with ad block developers to adjust the design of Manifest v3 to better allow for them to be implemented.
abtinf 5mo ago
Someone ought to build a browser that is designed from the ground up to treat the web for what it is: the most hostile ecosystem on the planet. uBlock/uMatrix functionality should be built into the core. Every domain and PSF should be sandboxed to its own profile. User agents and many js queries should return standard responses. Forcing display of video controls should be trivial. Manipulating pages to show/hide elements and customize feeds should be trivial. Right clicking to download any asset should just work. And so, so much more. The browser is my agent, not your mole.
- fineIllregister 5mo ago
  I think the closest right now would be the Tor Browser.
- tbeseda 5mo ago
  Vivaldi (not affiliated) kinda aims to do this. At least they build the blocker in. It uses the Blink engine, too. I don't think this move by Google will adversely affect Vivaldi in the same way it does Chrome.
  - cute_boi 5mo ago
    they aren't open source...
- palmotea 5mo ago
  > The browser is my agent, not your mole. Sorry, Google says no, and who are you to disagree? Sarcasm aside: this what people who wax poetic about the market miss. In the 21st century, where products have "minds" of their own (software), they are developed to serve their manufactures first. The consumer is a distant second. And competition won't align the market with consumers, because all manufacturers have similar incentives (aka "enshittification").
- xnx 5mo ago
  This should be Firefox, but they've expended a lot of time and energy reimplementing code from Chromium instead of focusing on where they can add unique value.
warpfactor 5mo ago
Firefox.
polairscience 5mo ago
And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.
- InsideOutSanta 5mo ago
  The nice thing about using Firefox is that Zen is by far the best browser I have ever used. So you get all the pros of Firefox in an amazing package.
- metalliqaz 5mo ago
  Hear, hear! Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks. My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.
- basch 5mo ago
  white hat firefox, black hat brave?
  - subscribed 5mo ago
    Why brave black hat?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- vovavili 5mo ago
  >I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.
  - throwaway27448 5mo ago
warpfactor 5mo ago
Firefox is great, and the community "zen" fork is even nicer.
- petesergeant 5mo ago
  Maybe you could expand inline in your comment about what makes Zen “even nicer”
  - vohk 5mo ago
    Not the OP, but I appreciated its attempts to declutter and rethink the layout. It encourages a full screen, minimalist style, and jumping between workspaces for different task sets. Hovering and slide out menus rather than permanent bars (although those are still an option). It also brought in some features like Split View before they hit mainline Firefox releases. Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...
- Izmaki 5mo ago
  I've wanted to love Zen for a while, I really have, but every time I start using it, it just feels... I don't know... foreign? Too new for comfort? I think it's one of those "once you get used to it, you never go back" technologies, but I also think it takes a bit of time to get used to it. Thoughts?
- nickthegreek 5mo ago
  Been a happy user of Zen for at least a year now. Big fan of the clean UI and vertical tabs. Super stable, no issues. Not in love with their tab group implementation, but its fine.
Daviey 5mo ago
Can we update the title, should be, "Google Chrome's next update will mark the end of me using it"
- majorchord 5mo ago
  I'm surprised you were using a proprietary browser in the first place
ThrowawayTestr 5mo ago
On Chrome* Firefox is just fine.
kyrra 5mo ago
Googler, opinions are my own. My understanding is they're doing this in the name of security, though it obviously has some benefit to ads. this policy more closely aligns with what Safari does today. And it prevents add-ons from scraping information since they have to put in the block list ahead of time. I've been using manifest v3 version of Adblock and it's worked just fine for me. But obviously is not perfect, but it fell into more towards security and privacy of the user against malicious extensions.
- summarybot 5mo ago
  Eh, Google controls the add-ons marketplace though. They control what add-ons are allowed, and they could even audit the add-ons for malicious code/behavior. Google, being a company that collects 75% of its revenue from ads, is being disingenuous by claiming this is a security-centered position. If security were the priority then the add-ons themselves should be inspected thoroughly, that much is obvious.
- 9dev 5mo ago
  I primarily use Safari, and only switch to Chrome if a site misbehaves; every time I do so, I'm aghast by the ads and popups I suddenly get everywhere - despite having uBlock installed. I refuse to take that as an acceptable state of browsing the internet.
  - dfabulich 5mo ago
    Safari has never supported MV2 uBlock Origin. Chrome with uBlock Lite is exactly the same as Safari with uBlock Lite.
    - 9dev 5mo ago
      In Safari, I use AdGuard and Consent-O-Matic, which catches pretty much everything.
      - dfabulich 5mo ago
        Others in this thread disagree with you! But, if they're good enough for Safari, then you'll find they're exactly as good in Chrome. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker/bgnkhhnnamicmpeenaelnjfhikgbkllg?hl=en&pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker/b... https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdj...
righthand 5mo ago
I’m going home for a visit. Will make sure to switch the family over to Firefox and explain why. Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that.
- post-it 5mo ago
  > Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that. This is one of my earliest tech memories. It was so fast when it came out.
dainank 5mo ago
The Ladybird browser could potentially be a nice alternative in the future: https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/
- thrownaway561 5mo ago
  that thing has been in development for the past 10 years. At this point, I doubt we ever see it.
  - dainank 5mo ago
    It is gaining more contributors and starting to be relatively compliant with most browser standards. Alpha release is expected EoY. I am optimistic for its future.
  - adamrt 5mo ago
    10 years is far from the truth. SerenityOS was started 8 years ago and ladybird wasn't split from Serenity until 2024 and has an alpha scheduled for release this year. It's been 2-4 years max.
qnleigh 5mo ago
Naive question: will it not be possible for ad blockers to upgrade to ManifestV3? Is there something about it that makes ad blocking much harder. What does Manifest actually do?
- LiamPowell 5mo ago
  Most ad blockers do already use MV3, uBlock Origin is the only one still using V2 as far as I know. There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...
  - 63stack 5mo ago
    If this is clickbait, you are a google shill. The limitations of v3 are very clearly explained on the ublock homepage: uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. Cannot use all filter lists simultaneously (rule limits apply) No cosmetic filtering in the default mode No scriptlet injection by default Limited dynamic filtering capabilities Requires broader host permissions upfront
    - krackers 5mo ago
      The part no one gets is that mv3 by design cannot do privacy protection by stripping tracking tags. Any sort of programatic URL manipulation or introspection is impossible by design. Advertisers can switch to a scheme of base64 query params inside URLs, and there's nothing MV3 based adblockers can do to filter this
- AntonyGarand 5mo ago
  There is ublock origin lite[0] on chromium which is the v3 compliant ad blocking strategy, but it is severely limited by the new ruleset and limitations, being a crippled version. There are more details available on this fan site of ublock[1]: > What Was Manifest V3? > Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking. > How This Affected uBlock Origin > uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025. [0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh?pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/... [1]: https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/
haritha-j 5mo ago
i keep hoping google will stop giving me reasons to switch ,because i can't be bothered to move all my passwords and stuff over, but every year they keep making it harder. Likewise, I desperately want to stay on windows because of anticheat, but every year they keep making it harder.
- vablings 5mo ago
  Make the switch now! Gaming on Linux is really only getting better every year with much hard work from valve. Outside of developers opting out pretty much every single game works out of the box. I value my limited leisure time and to be able to just jump on my computer and start playing without any annoying nags about windows updates or restart this and strange unexplainable issues. Move all of your passwords and logins too!
  - cholantesh 5mo ago
    Someone in the Thief community was celebrating the Nightdive remaster announcement because it is apparently getting much harder with each passing year to install and run the Dark Engine games on Windows; meanwhile I've been doing this multiple times a year for about a decade with Lutris.
  - GZGavinZhao 5mo ago
    There are still games you simply can't play on Linux, e.g. Valorant/LoL can't be played on Linux because of Riot Game's kernel-level anti-cheat. And as a highly addicted LoL player it's one of the only two reasons I still have Windows taking up 200GB of my precious hard drive space.
    - vablings 5mo ago
      Stop playing Valorant/LoL until its available, its as simple as that really. Vote with your wallet
- romanovcode 5mo ago
  Those passwords are not yours unless you did the work and enabled on-device encryption which is disabled by default.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
markstos 5mo ago
"This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers... Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit." This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.
testfrequency 5mo ago
This will be great for all Enterprise customers. Employees at companies using corporate computers love a good malicious popup, right?
rjh29 5mo ago
This is a non-story, insofar as the V3 shutdown has been in the works for years and has been rolled out since a year ago at least. I stopped being able to use them about six months ago.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Danox 5mo ago
No surprise Google is being Google and Chrome is great bloated spyware closing out those ad blockers is part of the game.
Legend2440 5mo ago
Bad headline. Popular ad blockers have already switched to MV3, and MV2 has already been disabled for all users.
- nicce 5mo ago
  Most would not consider MV3 versions as ”adblockers” anymore.
  - spankalee 5mo ago
    Yeah, I think calling the Mv3 versions "secure adblockers" would be more accurate.
    - WesolyKubeczek 5mo ago
      Secure for whom?
      - spankalee 5mo ago
        Browser users. Pre Mv3 extensions were a huge vector for malware. My in-laws were hit by that.
        jdiff 5mo ago
        You can write malicious MV3 extensions. The changes' stated reason was performance, not security.
    - curt15 5mo ago
      How about "nerfed adblockers"? Do any of the MV3 versions replicate the full power of ublock origin on Firefox? (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...)
    - pluralmonad 5mo ago
      To keep with the current parlance, "safe adblocker" would seem to fit better. Safe for whom, I think we all already know.
romanovcode 5mo ago
Firefox is great. Safari is also pretty good, Apple ADP is true e2e encrypted bookmarks, history and so on. I really do not see the reason to be using Chrome for multiple years now.
siren2026 5mo ago
Google revealing how evil they really are. That was always the plan with Chrome. Put B$ of engineering efforts into creating a nice browser and pushing people to switch over. Once everyone is addicted and forgot about the competition, start to quietly make it more and more of a Spyware. Chrome has always and will always be an attempt at controlling the client side of the funnel to be in charge of how much ads they can deliver to your brain. It's 100% a spyware with a side-effect of a browser. Switch today. Firefox works well.
- advisedwang 5mo ago
  > That was always the plan with Chrome No. The original plan for Chrome was to save money on "traffic acquisition cost" (The cash they give to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine) by moving users away those company's browsers. Buuuuut, once Chrome turned out to dominate the browser market, the temptation to abuse that dominance was too much.
  - hliyan 5mo ago
    Just goes to show that no one with power can be relied on to self-regulate the use of that power. Power being any ability to nudge another human being toward actions that are not purely in their own self interest.
zb3 5mo ago
Stop suggesting this Firefox crap which is not only much slower but it also can't even properly manage RAM usage on mobile, leading to app being killed on my low-RAM device, chrome can deal with it even though that's a "desktop" version with extensions for a much newer high end device. Restricting webRequestBlocking (but it's not going away, just needs a policy extension) and synchronous executeScript did in practice make adblockers unreliable though.. I partially worked it around by using a custom extension that uses the recent userScripts API.. BTW, it's not possible to inject scripts to workers like a ServiceWorker or to replace it's content (DNR let's you redirect but this redirect breaks SW origin + it's visible when you disallow redirects), but MV2 was no better, chrome extensions never had advanced capabilities for ad blocking, a bug about not being able to access POST data via webRequest was open for 10+ years and will probably never be fixed. But still, firefox is not the alternative, even WebKit is much better.
- OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
  How little RAM does your phone have? My Moto G4 Power (less than $200, before the RAM crunch much less) with 2 GB runs Firefox hunky-dory, and I'm one of those triple-digit tab people.
  - zb3 5mo ago
    It's not about the number of (possibly sleeping) tabs, it's about how FF doesn't manage those active ones to prevent the app from crashing.. try opening 10 instagram profiles (via open in new tab) in the web browser. I told you all that Chrome doesn't crash, FF does + pages work much slower.
    - szmarczak 5mo ago
      Have you verified what caused the crash via logcat? Firefox has never crashed in my case, not even once (but I'm not running a low ram device).
      - zb3 5mo ago
hirako2000 5mo ago
Brave, Vivaldi (successor of opera), a few others also based on chromium work just fine. No ads.
- bilekas 5mo ago
  I'm also on brave and they've promised support for M2 for the future but they're of course a fork of chromium, so we'll have to see how committed they are to implement improvements that they can't simply merge in due to conflicting behaviours. Which you can almost guarantee Google will do.
  - EbNar 5mo ago
    Inbuilt ad blockers aren't affected by whatever change Google may do to the extension ecosystem.
dbbk 5mo ago
[flagged]
- jdiff 5mo ago
  An expansion rather than just a contradiction would be welcome. In what way is it not true?
  - dbbk 5mo ago
    Ad blockers work fine when upgraded to the new extension spec
    - jdiff 5mo ago
      They do not. They operate at a reduced level of functionality that does not match previous capabilities. uBlock Origin would never have a separate Lite version if that was not the case. Nobody would care about a new version of the WebExtensions manifest if that weren't the case.
      - dbbk 5mo ago
        It's a very different way of implementing ad blocking yes but it still works for 99% of the old use cases. Chrome "closing the door on ad blockers" is just blatantly not the case and over-exaggerating.
        jdiff 5mo ago
        Agreed that it's exaggeration. Adblockers are possible, they're just severely kneecapped. It will still remove most ads, but it opens the door for more ads that can't be blocked by the present means. Ad providers and blockers have always been in an arms race, and this change halts one of the race participants in their tracks. That is something significant, especially for an ad company.
Noaidi 5mo ago
I do not mind advertising on websites. What I mind is bad ads, ads with malware, way too many ads, and ads that track me. This is where Google gets the whole ad thing wrong. They are focusing on the wrong problem. If you think about the economics of it, a very popular website could survive on only on ad because the advertiser would pay a premium to be seen on the website. So that is my other argument, bad websites need a whole bunch of ads to be profitable. So better websites would help as well.
- tartoran 5mo ago
  The thing is that they don’t care about what you and I mind or don’t mind. The only goal is to maximize profit to shareholders. Our only option is to use ad blockers for now.
- OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
  The problem with that logic is that if one advertiser is willing to pay a premium for placement on the site, more advertisers likely are. Which creates a perverse incentive to inject exactly as many ads as most users will put up with, which shifts the users' perspective on the amount of acceptable ads, which encourages more ad placement. Rinse, repeat until you reach the current state of affairs.
AustinDev 5mo ago
This is your sign to start using a DNS based ad/tracking blocker. Run it on your VPS with tailscale if you want it available everywhere without significant security overhead.
- MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
  DNS adblocking doesn't catch everything.
  - pluralmonad 5mo ago
    Is it time to run every document we download through a sandboxed local LLM to clean it up on the fly? How long then before the ad tech companies start prompt injecting?
    - MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
      What a strange leap. There's rather a lot we can do to keep regular adblocking going and we don't have to just accept what Google deigns to give us. Wasting a bunch of GPU power to have an LLM hallucinate which parts of a page to delete hardly seems like a solution to me.
      - pluralmonad 5mo ago
        It was mostly an absurdist comment. I can squint and see this sort of thing coming though.
rschiavone 5mo ago
I remember when they first announced it years ago and they pretended to care by walking back the change. As always, the strategy is to wait for the dust to settle and then push the changes again.
- archerx 5mo ago
  Well it got me to uninstall chrome so that’s something.
inquirerGeneral 5mo ago
[dead]
animitronix 5mo ago
And I will be closing the door on Chrome
dwa3592 5mo ago
I use brave and it seems to work just fine against ads. Brave also has lower memory consumption than google chrome.
imzadi 5mo ago
I've been using Orion with Kagi for search. Every once in a while I hit a site that won't work on Orion (looking at you Cafe Zupas), but then I jump over to firefox.
wetpaws 5mo ago
[dead]
debo_ 5mo ago
I wonder what degoogled chromium will do. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to drop MV2 support given all the other stuff they're doing, but it would be nice if I could continue to use full uBlock with it.
mgrunwald_ 5mo ago
Chrome is the new Internet Exploder. Use anything with built-in adblock-rust.
mrbluecoat 5mo ago
Better title: “Google Chrome's Next Update Will Drive Privacy-Minded Users To Other Browsers“
0xblinq 5mo ago
Use brave. I've been using it for the last...I don't know... 6 years? Internet is unusable for me without it. It even makes YouTube usable again.
ur-whale 5mo ago
People are still using the spying machine in June '26 ? Well this is a wake-up call folks, time to switch away from that abomination.
_-_-__-_-_- 5mo ago
Ungoogled Chromium for when I need profiles. Firefox for everything else and DuckDuckGo on iOS
twostorytower 5mo ago
This is a bit of a sensationalist headline. MV3 ad blocking extensions like uBO Lite work fine for 99.9% of cases. MV3 certainly is a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world for ad blocking.
mystraline 5mo ago
Title: Ad company makes a browser update to disable ad blocking News at 11.
anal_reactor 5mo ago
Sad truth is, internet isn't really worth browsing anymore.
- HDBaseT 5mo ago
  Disconnect your internet service then.
  - anal_reactor 5mo ago
    My phone's internet malfunctions and I never bothered to fix it.
LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
End user will close the door on using Chrome for any reason...
- bogdan 5mo ago
  There's so many chromium forks that I can't find one reason to stick with Google Chrome. I hope more people switch. Both Vivaldi and Brave are superior.
JKCalhoun 5mo ago
Increasingly, LLMs are my browser. Now, if there were just an LLM browser that would fetch a page, strip the ads, and serve me that…
- n2h4 5mo ago
  and after some traction serve you ads via the LLM itself (a la brave browser)?
  - JKCalhoun 5mo ago
    To be sure, air some point I will no longer trust the cloud-based LLMs… Sounds though like a task that would be easy for the more recent downloadable (local) LLMs.
jasonvorhe 5mo ago
First line of defense is local DNS based adblocking followed by Brave on all devices. The only time I see ads or Eurocrat cookie nonsense is when GitHub rate limits access to the updated filter lists. Let's hope this will hold for a while.
alex1138 5mo ago
I'm sorry for the glib comment but "they could just not do this" Seriously. Imagine a company that solicits advice from the public. Not all of it is going to be good. The customer isn't always right, but basically the reaction to Should We Do This would be Fuck No But they'll do it anyway. You should get fired from your job if you just plow ahead like this
asadm 5mo ago
i have been using uBlock Origin Lite and haven't missed MV2 at all? What's the outrage? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
ldom66 5mo ago
I am scared that with the current status quo, when websites mostly served on chrome start benefiting from the ability to guarantee ad display, that they might start blocking any client that doesn't support it. When that happens we'll start seeing the web degrade in a huge way. This is a huge loss for everyone, I'm very upset with Google for pushing this monopolistic garbage.
ApolloFortyNine 5mo ago
UBlock Origin Lite has been working fine (I had no idea MV2 wasn't actually disabled yet), and uses MV3.
klipklop 5mo ago
For all the folks that proudly say “fine I will use browser X instead!” Don’t you realize the next step is to slowly change chrome so sites will work in chrome, but not other minority browsers? Google is playing the long game. Boil the frogs slowly.
janalsncm 5mo ago
> Meta’s Chief Security Officer resigned the very next day. It would have been very funny if they reassigned him to data labeling too.
Gud 5mo ago
Fuck Google
dbpc 5mo ago
Blocking ads at the network level seems to be the right approach moving forward.
yaro330 5mo ago
uBO lite has been working flawlessly for me for the past couple of years.
RandyOrion 5mo ago
Seems like the affected version of chrome is 150 and 151, and the timewindow is near. Because of ungoogled-chromium, I'm used to manually update the browser. This time I won't update until MV2 problem is solved properly. I've already lost my extensions once by updating to 138 without checking google's adversarial move, and got the forbidden knowledge that I cannot manually downgrade chromium because it won't start.
microflash 5mo ago
What a time! A browser was supposed to be the "user agent". Regardless of what people say about Firefox, I've been using it for uBlock Origin and containers for ages, and won't be trading it for whatever performance, battery life, compatibility gains people continue to use Chrome for. Choose whatever is important for you, though.
joquarky 5mo ago
I don't have an ad blocker. I have two bookmarklets: - remove all IFrames - remove all display:fixed elements Both also use a mutation observer to catch new instances. This takes care of 90% of the annoying ads and cookie popups. To push for more leads into excess complexity for marginal gain.
- timbit42 5mo ago
  That doesn't block tracking.
627467 5mo ago
I've been using private DNS for couple of years now, almost never miss browser level blocking now
SwamyM 5mo ago
Does anyone use any Firefox forks (Waterfox, Librewolf, etc.) as their primary browser for privacy and performance reasons? I know Zen is fairly popular for it's UI choices but I am interested to see if any of the other options are actually superior to Firefox.
tsoukase 5mo ago
I and I hope many others globally will not care. Since the last months I reverted my browsers from 6-0 in favour of Chrome to 1-5 for Firefox and the one Chrome accesses local adfree sites at work. We are gonna see a revival of Firefox, hopefully like its 2006.
matltc 5mo ago
My approach is ubolite/no script/privacy badger for when I really want chrome. Otherwise I just run Brave. Always brave on mobile since chrome native doesn't support extensions. Seems fine for me. Oh and I set my DNS server to adguard Probably some pixels or whatever get through but I don't have to see ads shrug

291 points by speckx 5mo ago

Recent and related: Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 - June 2026 (450 comments)

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970

GeekyBear 5mo ago
"Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension" really doesn't tell a general audience what is happening here. No wonder it gained little notice.
- neves 5mo ago
  The current title is a lot better.
  - rafram 5mo ago
    You mean the title of this post? It's much worse, in my opinion - plenty of strong ad blockers run on MV3. Even the developer of uBlock Origin (Lite) seems to have conceded that the MV3 approach is less resource intensive and didn't require sacrificing any of the features that 99.9% of users use.
    - deafpolygon 5mo ago
      Do you have a source for this ?
    - neves 5mo ago
      MV2 and MV3 is completely uninteresting for me. But you'll have to take my advblocker from my dead cold hands
- bcye 5mo ago
  Neither does MV3 close the door on ad blockers. This title seems like gigantic clickbait.
- dang 5mo ago
  There have been quite a few threads about it recently - unfortunately I don't have time to dig up links at the moment. (also, 450+ comments is not little notice!)
  - ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
    Previous link is referenced in this submission as a source, and was updated with the same info that was included in this submission. Same discussion.
  - GeekyBear 5mo ago
    For an abuse of monopoly power this big, I would argue that only getting ~400 upvotes is indeed little notice.

neves 5mo ago

Will Brave, which is based in Chromium, still block ads? Since they are changing Chromium, I don't think so.

kgwxd 5mo ago
The ones Brave choose to block, sure. You're going to end up with the same problem eventually.
- Izmaki 5mo ago
  In my experience they're sometimes a little too aggressive and I have to disable the "shields" for the page to function correctly. I have never seen an add while using Brave and that's after 1.5 million trackers blocked and 50 gb bandwidth "saved". The only browser I would switch to away from Brave is one that, as was described by another user in here, sandboxes all pages/domains and ensures that no data leaks outside unless you are actively allowing it. Think Qubes OS but for browsers. I imagine a nice "drag this domain-box into the Facebook domain blob of a tree structure to allow linking and sharing of data" would be a cool feature. That would make it easy to select and confirm which FAANG company gets your data on which domain.
Cider9986 5mo ago
Pretty sure Brave shields isn't based on an extension API so it shouldn't be affected. Have people actually noticed worse performance from uBlock Origin lite? This article isn't nuanced enough. Ad blockers will continue to work.
- charcircuit 5mo ago
  I mostly use ublock origin light on my work laptop for YouTube and I've never seen an ad.
- wirybeige 5mo ago
  I have noticed it to be slightly worse, mostly on "bad" sites. Just using Brave at this point though.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

ramijames 5mo ago

Use Firefox. It's an excellent browser and needs your support.

esskay 5mo ago
Just a shame its a tiny bit slower than chromium based browsers still (the ui, not the web page rendering), and you dont have to take my word for it, a web search for something like 'firefox sluggish compared to chrome' will back this up too as I've tried switching multiple times but always end up back on a chromium variant because the firefox ui just doesn't feel like an upgrade. Personally I've just given up trying with firefox and I now put up with brave - its certainly not perfect but at least the ad blocker isnt about to break.
- lenkite 5mo ago
  I believe Firefox without ads is faster & safer than Chrome with Ads.
- ramijames 5mo ago
  Not using adware seems like a big upgrade to me.
- aleksandrm 5mo ago
  Not in my experience. Never had issues with FF feeling sluggish at all.
  - dawnerd 5mo ago
    Only place I feel it slow is on Google Meet and clickup.
    - wpm 5mo ago
      Almost as if it's on purpose
    - sheept 5mo ago

charcircuit 5mo ago

This is not true. There are other APIs extensions can use to block ads and browsers like Brave have ad blocking built into the engine itself.

xienze 5mo ago

It's obviously not perfect but DNS-level ad blockers like Pihole or Adguard Home still make a dramatic difference, so all is not lost.

muvlon 5mo ago
If Google ever decides to "close the door" on these too, all they need to do is make Chrome always use DoH instead of classic DNS.
- lemagedurage 5mo ago
  I don't think this would fly between enterprise usage of custom DNS, captive portals, privacy protection etc
- drnick1 5mo ago
  Do you mean that that Chrome would force users to use 8.8.8.8 as DNS provider? I don't think this would be acceptable or accepted.
- EbNar 5mo ago
  You can block DoH by blacklisting their domains (which is what ControlD and NextDNS do, by the way).
kgwxd 5mo ago
Leaving Chrome is 1000x easier than maintaining that.

throwatdem12311 5mo ago

Firefox is the only sane option. It’s not perfect but it’s better than the alternatives. Chromium forks are at the mercy of Google doing everything they can to stop ad blocking. Firefox forks are often maintain by just “some dude”. If they decide they don’t want to maintain it anymore, it’s done. If everyone switches to a fork and then Firefox goes away because nobody is using the browser anymore, it’s done.

OptionOfT 5mo ago
And sadly, Firefox on iOS is the only browser that doesn't have a the possibility to run an Adblocker. Safari can run uBlock Origin. Brave had one built-in. Hell, even Edge has Adblock Plus. Does Mozilla have a contract with Google to not build one in as part of the search contract?
- aleqs 5mo ago
  Firefox on Android supports ublock, not sure why it wouldn't support it on iOS
  - jmcphers 5mo ago
    It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. Firefox on iOS is just a skinned version of WebKit/Safari. See 2.5.6: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#performance https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...
    - CharlesW 5mo ago
      > It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. That's incorrect, and Firefox doesn't blame Apple for this. Many 3rd-party iOS browsers do ad blocking natively and/or via extensions. https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/ios https://orionbrowser.com/platforms/ios
    - dwaite 5mo ago
      This is not the cause though - other third-party browsers on iOS can do ad-blocking, and also can use system-installed extensions. They could also launch an alternative browser engine for iOS and iPadOS in the EU.

insanitybit 5mo ago

tl;dr MV2 is going away (after already being deprecated a while ago). MV3 exists, you're probably already using it in your adblocker.

whitepoplar 5mo ago

A lot of people have been very vocal about this. I use uBlock Origin Lite and haven't noticed a difference between it and uBlock Origin. Am I missing something?

Legend2440 5mo ago
Same. I'm still not seeing ads. I've realized over time that people on the internet love finding things to be mad about, because raging against evil is fun. They'll make up an injustice if they can't find one today.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  They’re not “making up an injustice.” Google is actively trying to stop ad blocking, this is a fact. You can argue whether or not it’s as severe as some people make it sound or whether people should be upset at all (I think we should be), but let’s not act like this was made up whole cloth.
  - charcircuit 5mo ago
    I've seen some teams in YouTube try and stop ad blocking, but I haven't seen Google, or more importantly Chromium try and stop it.
    - Forgeties79 5mo ago
      1) YouTube is owned by Google and their entire revenue model is in alignment with how Google does things, which ublock origin interferes with. 2) Manifest v3 is Google’s, not YouTube’s, project.
      - charcircuit 5mo ago
        Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blockers. In fact the chromium team worked together with ad block developers to adjust the design of Manifest v3 to better allow for them to be implemented.

abtinf 5mo ago

Someone ought to build a browser that is designed from the ground up to treat the web for what it is: the most hostile ecosystem on the planet. uBlock/uMatrix functionality should be built into the core. Every domain and PSF should be sandboxed to its own profile. User agents and many js queries should return standard responses. Forcing display of video controls should be trivial. Manipulating pages to show/hide elements and customize feeds should be trivial. Right clicking to download any asset should just work. And so, so much more. The browser is my agent, not your mole.

fineIllregister 5mo ago
I think the closest right now would be the Tor Browser.
tbeseda 5mo ago
Vivaldi (not affiliated) kinda aims to do this. At least they build the blocker in. It uses the Blink engine, too. I don't think this move by Google will adversely affect Vivaldi in the same way it does Chrome.
- cute_boi 5mo ago
  they aren't open source...
palmotea 5mo ago
> The browser is my agent, not your mole. Sorry, Google says no, and who are you to disagree? Sarcasm aside: this what people who wax poetic about the market miss. In the 21st century, where products have "minds" of their own (software), they are developed to serve their manufactures first. The consumer is a distant second. And competition won't align the market with consumers, because all manufacturers have similar incentives (aka "enshittification").
xnx 5mo ago
This should be Firefox, but they've expended a lot of time and energy reimplementing code from Chromium instead of focusing on where they can add unique value.

warpfactor 5mo ago

Firefox.

polairscience 5mo ago

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.

InsideOutSanta 5mo ago
The nice thing about using Firefox is that Zen is by far the best browser I have ever used. So you get all the pros of Firefox in an amazing package.
metalliqaz 5mo ago
Hear, hear! Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks. My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.
basch 5mo ago
white hat firefox, black hat brave?
- subscribed 5mo ago
  Why brave black hat?
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
vovavili 5mo ago
>I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.
- throwaway27448 5mo ago

warpfactor 5mo ago

Firefox is great, and the community "zen" fork is even nicer.

petesergeant 5mo ago
Maybe you could expand inline in your comment about what makes Zen “even nicer”
- vohk 5mo ago
  Not the OP, but I appreciated its attempts to declutter and rethink the layout. It encourages a full screen, minimalist style, and jumping between workspaces for different task sets. Hovering and slide out menus rather than permanent bars (although those are still an option). It also brought in some features like Split View before they hit mainline Firefox releases. Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...
Izmaki 5mo ago
I've wanted to love Zen for a while, I really have, but every time I start using it, it just feels... I don't know... foreign? Too new for comfort? I think it's one of those "once you get used to it, you never go back" technologies, but I also think it takes a bit of time to get used to it. Thoughts?
nickthegreek 5mo ago
Been a happy user of Zen for at least a year now. Big fan of the clean UI and vertical tabs. Super stable, no issues. Not in love with their tab group implementation, but its fine.

Daviey 5mo ago

Can we update the title, should be, "Google Chrome's next update will mark the end of me using it"

majorchord 5mo ago
I'm surprised you were using a proprietary browser in the first place

ThrowawayTestr 5mo ago

On Chrome* Firefox is just fine.

kyrra 5mo ago

Googler, opinions are my own. My understanding is they're doing this in the name of security, though it obviously has some benefit to ads. this policy more closely aligns with what Safari does today. And it prevents add-ons from scraping information since they have to put in the block list ahead of time. I've been using manifest v3 version of Adblock and it's worked just fine for me. But obviously is not perfect, but it fell into more towards security and privacy of the user against malicious extensions.

summarybot 5mo ago
Eh, Google controls the add-ons marketplace though. They control what add-ons are allowed, and they could even audit the add-ons for malicious code/behavior. Google, being a company that collects 75% of its revenue from ads, is being disingenuous by claiming this is a security-centered position. If security were the priority then the add-ons themselves should be inspected thoroughly, that much is obvious.
9dev 5mo ago
I primarily use Safari, and only switch to Chrome if a site misbehaves; every time I do so, I'm aghast by the ads and popups I suddenly get everywhere - despite having uBlock installed. I refuse to take that as an acceptable state of browsing the internet.
- dfabulich 5mo ago
  Safari has never supported MV2 uBlock Origin. Chrome with uBlock Lite is exactly the same as Safari with uBlock Lite.
  - 9dev 5mo ago
    In Safari, I use AdGuard and Consent-O-Matic, which catches pretty much everything.
    - dfabulich 5mo ago
      Others in this thread disagree with you! But, if they're good enough for Safari, then you'll find they're exactly as good in Chrome. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker/bgnkhhnnamicmpeenaelnjfhikgbkllg?hl=en&pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker/b... https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/mdj...

righthand 5mo ago

I’m going home for a visit. Will make sure to switch the family over to Firefox and explain why. Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that.

post-it 5mo ago
> Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that. This is one of my earliest tech memories. It was so fast when it came out.

dainank 5mo ago

The Ladybird browser could potentially be a nice alternative in the future: https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/

thrownaway561 5mo ago
that thing has been in development for the past 10 years. At this point, I doubt we ever see it.
- dainank 5mo ago
  It is gaining more contributors and starting to be relatively compliant with most browser standards. Alpha release is expected EoY. I am optimistic for its future.
- adamrt 5mo ago
  10 years is far from the truth. SerenityOS was started 8 years ago and ladybird wasn't split from Serenity until 2024 and has an alpha scheduled for release this year. It's been 2-4 years max.

qnleigh 5mo ago

Naive question: will it not be possible for ad blockers to upgrade to ManifestV3? Is there something about it that makes ad blocking much harder. What does Manifest actually do?

LiamPowell 5mo ago
Most ad blockers do already use MV3, uBlock Origin is the only one still using V2 as far as I know. There are some drawbacks to V3, however none prevent creating an effective ad blocker, as demonstrated by the fact that many exist. Though saying that doesn't make for nearly as effective clickbait...
- 63stack 5mo ago
  If this is clickbait, you are a google shill. The limitations of v3 are very clearly explained on the ublock homepage: uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. Cannot use all filter lists simultaneously (rule limits apply) No cosmetic filtering in the default mode No scriptlet injection by default Limited dynamic filtering capabilities Requires broader host permissions upfront
  - krackers 5mo ago
    The part no one gets is that mv3 by design cannot do privacy protection by stripping tracking tags. Any sort of programatic URL manipulation or introspection is impossible by design. Advertisers can switch to a scheme of base64 query params inside URLs, and there's nothing MV3 based adblockers can do to filter this
AntonyGarand 5mo ago
There is ublock origin lite[0] on chromium which is the v3 compliant ad blocking strategy, but it is severely limited by the new ruleset and limitations, being a crippled version. There are more details available on this fan site of ublock[1]: > What Was Manifest V3? > Manifest V3 was Google's major update to the Chrome extension platform. The most significant change was replacing the webRequest API with the more limited declarativeNetRequest API. While Google cited security and performance benefits, this change removed capabilities that content blockers like uBlock Origin relied on for effective ad and tracker blocking. > How This Affected uBlock Origin > uBlock Origin used the webRequest API to intercept and block network requests in real-time. The replacement declarativeNetRequest API has hard limits on the number of filter rules (previously 30,000, now 330,000) and lacks the dynamic filtering capabilities that made uBlock Origin so effective. As a result, the full uBlock Origin extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Chrome permanently disabled all remaining MV2 extensions in July 2025. [0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh?pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/... [1]: https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/

haritha-j 5mo ago

i keep hoping google will stop giving me reasons to switch ,because i can't be bothered to move all my passwords and stuff over, but every year they keep making it harder. Likewise, I desperately want to stay on windows because of anticheat, but every year they keep making it harder.

vablings 5mo ago
Make the switch now! Gaming on Linux is really only getting better every year with much hard work from valve. Outside of developers opting out pretty much every single game works out of the box. I value my limited leisure time and to be able to just jump on my computer and start playing without any annoying nags about windows updates or restart this and strange unexplainable issues. Move all of your passwords and logins too!
- cholantesh 5mo ago
  Someone in the Thief community was celebrating the Nightdive remaster announcement because it is apparently getting much harder with each passing year to install and run the Dark Engine games on Windows; meanwhile I've been doing this multiple times a year for about a decade with Lutris.
- GZGavinZhao 5mo ago
  There are still games you simply can't play on Linux, e.g. Valorant/LoL can't be played on Linux because of Riot Game's kernel-level anti-cheat. And as a highly addicted LoL player it's one of the only two reasons I still have Windows taking up 200GB of my precious hard drive space.
  - vablings 5mo ago
    Stop playing Valorant/LoL until its available, its as simple as that really. Vote with your wallet
romanovcode 5mo ago
Those passwords are not yours unless you did the work and enabled on-device encryption which is disabled by default.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

markstos 5mo ago

"This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers... Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit." This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.

testfrequency 5mo ago

This will be great for all Enterprise customers. Employees at companies using corporate computers love a good malicious popup, right?

rjh29 5mo ago

This is a non-story, insofar as the V3 shutdown has been in the works for years and has been rolled out since a year ago at least. I stopped being able to use them about six months ago.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Danox 5mo ago

No surprise Google is being Google and Chrome is great bloated spyware closing out those ad blockers is part of the game.

Legend2440 5mo ago

Bad headline. Popular ad blockers have already switched to MV3, and MV2 has already been disabled for all users.

nicce 5mo ago
Most would not consider MV3 versions as ”adblockers” anymore.
- spankalee 5mo ago
  Yeah, I think calling the Mv3 versions "secure adblockers" would be more accurate.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5mo ago
    Secure for whom?
    - spankalee 5mo ago
      Browser users. Pre Mv3 extensions were a huge vector for malware. My in-laws were hit by that.
      - jdiff 5mo ago
        You can write malicious MV3 extensions. The changes' stated reason was performance, not security.
  - curt15 5mo ago
    How about "nerfed adblockers"? Do any of the MV3 versions replicate the full power of ublock origin on Firefox? (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...)
  - pluralmonad 5mo ago
    To keep with the current parlance, "safe adblocker" would seem to fit better. Safe for whom, I think we all already know.

romanovcode 5mo ago

Firefox is great. Safari is also pretty good, Apple ADP is true e2e encrypted bookmarks, history and so on. I really do not see the reason to be using Chrome for multiple years now.

siren2026 5mo ago

Google revealing how evil they really are. That was always the plan with Chrome. Put B$ of engineering efforts into creating a nice browser and pushing people to switch over. Once everyone is addicted and forgot about the competition, start to quietly make it more and more of a Spyware. Chrome has always and will always be an attempt at controlling the client side of the funnel to be in charge of how much ads they can deliver to your brain. It's 100% a spyware with a side-effect of a browser. Switch today. Firefox works well.

advisedwang 5mo ago
> That was always the plan with Chrome No. The original plan for Chrome was to save money on "traffic acquisition cost" (The cash they give to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine) by moving users away those company's browsers. Buuuuut, once Chrome turned out to dominate the browser market, the temptation to abuse that dominance was too much.
- hliyan 5mo ago
  Just goes to show that no one with power can be relied on to self-regulate the use of that power. Power being any ability to nudge another human being toward actions that are not purely in their own self interest.

zb3 5mo ago

Stop suggesting this Firefox crap which is not only much slower but it also can't even properly manage RAM usage on mobile, leading to app being killed on my low-RAM device, chrome can deal with it even though that's a "desktop" version with extensions for a much newer high end device. Restricting webRequestBlocking (but it's not going away, just needs a policy extension) and synchronous executeScript did in practice make adblockers unreliable though.. I partially worked it around by using a custom extension that uses the recent userScripts API.. BTW, it's not possible to inject scripts to workers like a ServiceWorker or to replace it's content (DNR let's you redirect but this redirect breaks SW origin + it's visible when you disallow redirects), but MV2 was no better, chrome extensions never had advanced capabilities for ad blocking, a bug about not being able to access POST data via webRequest was open for 10+ years and will probably never be fixed. But still, firefox is not the alternative, even WebKit is much better.

OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
How little RAM does your phone have? My Moto G4 Power (less than $200, before the RAM crunch much less) with 2 GB runs Firefox hunky-dory, and I'm one of those triple-digit tab people.
- zb3 5mo ago
  It's not about the number of (possibly sleeping) tabs, it's about how FF doesn't manage those active ones to prevent the app from crashing.. try opening 10 instagram profiles (via open in new tab) in the web browser. I told you all that Chrome doesn't crash, FF does + pages work much slower.
  - szmarczak 5mo ago
    Have you verified what caused the crash via logcat? Firefox has never crashed in my case, not even once (but I'm not running a low ram device).
    - zb3 5mo ago

hirako2000 5mo ago

Brave, Vivaldi (successor of opera), a few others also based on chromium work just fine. No ads.

bilekas 5mo ago
I'm also on brave and they've promised support for M2 for the future but they're of course a fork of chromium, so we'll have to see how committed they are to implement improvements that they can't simply merge in due to conflicting behaviours. Which you can almost guarantee Google will do.
- EbNar 5mo ago
  Inbuilt ad blockers aren't affected by whatever change Google may do to the extension ecosystem.

dbbk 5mo ago

[flagged]

jdiff 5mo ago
An expansion rather than just a contradiction would be welcome. In what way is it not true?
- dbbk 5mo ago
  Ad blockers work fine when upgraded to the new extension spec
  - jdiff 5mo ago
    They do not. They operate at a reduced level of functionality that does not match previous capabilities. uBlock Origin would never have a separate Lite version if that was not the case. Nobody would care about a new version of the WebExtensions manifest if that weren't the case.
    - dbbk 5mo ago
      It's a very different way of implementing ad blocking yes but it still works for 99% of the old use cases. Chrome "closing the door on ad blockers" is just blatantly not the case and over-exaggerating.
      - jdiff 5mo ago
        Agreed that it's exaggeration. Adblockers are possible, they're just severely kneecapped. It will still remove most ads, but it opens the door for more ads that can't be blocked by the present means. Ad providers and blockers have always been in an arms race, and this change halts one of the race participants in their tracks. That is something significant, especially for an ad company.

Noaidi 5mo ago

I do not mind advertising on websites. What I mind is bad ads, ads with malware, way too many ads, and ads that track me. This is where Google gets the whole ad thing wrong. They are focusing on the wrong problem. If you think about the economics of it, a very popular website could survive on only on ad because the advertiser would pay a premium to be seen on the website. So that is my other argument, bad websites need a whole bunch of ads to be profitable. So better websites would help as well.

tartoran 5mo ago
The thing is that they don’t care about what you and I mind or don’t mind. The only goal is to maximize profit to shareholders. Our only option is to use ad blockers for now.
OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
The problem with that logic is that if one advertiser is willing to pay a premium for placement on the site, more advertisers likely are. Which creates a perverse incentive to inject exactly as many ads as most users will put up with, which shifts the users' perspective on the amount of acceptable ads, which encourages more ad placement. Rinse, repeat until you reach the current state of affairs.

AustinDev 5mo ago

This is your sign to start using a DNS based ad/tracking blocker. Run it on your VPS with tailscale if you want it available everywhere without significant security overhead.

MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
DNS adblocking doesn't catch everything.
- pluralmonad 5mo ago
  Is it time to run every document we download through a sandboxed local LLM to clean it up on the fly? How long then before the ad tech companies start prompt injecting?
  - MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
    What a strange leap. There's rather a lot we can do to keep regular adblocking going and we don't have to just accept what Google deigns to give us. Wasting a bunch of GPU power to have an LLM hallucinate which parts of a page to delete hardly seems like a solution to me.
    - pluralmonad 5mo ago
      It was mostly an absurdist comment. I can squint and see this sort of thing coming though.

rschiavone 5mo ago

I remember when they first announced it years ago and they pretended to care by walking back the change. As always, the strategy is to wait for the dust to settle and then push the changes again.

archerx 5mo ago
Well it got me to uninstall chrome so that’s something.

inquirerGeneral 5mo ago

[dead]

animitronix 5mo ago

And I will be closing the door on Chrome

dwa3592 5mo ago

I use brave and it seems to work just fine against ads. Brave also has lower memory consumption than google chrome.

imzadi 5mo ago

I've been using Orion with Kagi for search. Every once in a while I hit a site that won't work on Orion (looking at you Cafe Zupas), but then I jump over to firefox.

wetpaws 5mo ago

[dead]

debo_ 5mo ago

I wonder what degoogled chromium will do. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to drop MV2 support given all the other stuff they're doing, but it would be nice if I could continue to use full uBlock with it.

mgrunwald_ 5mo ago

Chrome is the new Internet Exploder. Use anything with built-in adblock-rust.

mrbluecoat 5mo ago

Better title: “Google Chrome's Next Update Will Drive Privacy-Minded Users To Other Browsers“

0xblinq 5mo ago

Use brave. I've been using it for the last...I don't know... 6 years? Internet is unusable for me without it. It even makes YouTube usable again.

ur-whale 5mo ago

People are still using the spying machine in June '26 ? Well this is a wake-up call folks, time to switch away from that abomination.

_-_-__-_-_- 5mo ago

Ungoogled Chromium for when I need profiles. Firefox for everything else and DuckDuckGo on iOS

twostorytower 5mo ago

This is a bit of a sensationalist headline. MV3 ad blocking extensions like uBO Lite work fine for 99.9% of cases. MV3 certainly is a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world for ad blocking.

mystraline 5mo ago

Title: Ad company makes a browser update to disable ad blocking News at 11.

anal_reactor 5mo ago

Sad truth is, internet isn't really worth browsing anymore.

HDBaseT 5mo ago
Disconnect your internet service then.
- anal_reactor 5mo ago
  My phone's internet malfunctions and I never bothered to fix it.

LogicFailsMe 5mo ago

End user will close the door on using Chrome for any reason...

bogdan 5mo ago
There's so many chromium forks that I can't find one reason to stick with Google Chrome. I hope more people switch. Both Vivaldi and Brave are superior.

JKCalhoun 5mo ago

Increasingly, LLMs are my browser. Now, if there were just an LLM browser that would fetch a page, strip the ads, and serve me that…

n2h4 5mo ago
and after some traction serve you ads via the LLM itself (a la brave browser)?
- JKCalhoun 5mo ago
  To be sure, air some point I will no longer trust the cloud-based LLMs… Sounds though like a task that would be easy for the more recent downloadable (local) LLMs.

jasonvorhe 5mo ago

First line of defense is local DNS based adblocking followed by Brave on all devices. The only time I see ads or Eurocrat cookie nonsense is when GitHub rate limits access to the updated filter lists. Let's hope this will hold for a while.

alex1138 5mo ago

I'm sorry for the glib comment but "they could just not do this" Seriously. Imagine a company that solicits advice from the public. Not all of it is going to be good. The customer isn't always right, but basically the reaction to Should We Do This would be Fuck No But they'll do it anyway. You should get fired from your job if you just plow ahead like this

asadm 5mo ago

i have been using uBlock Origin Lite and haven't missed MV2 at all? What's the outrage? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...

ldom66 5mo ago

I am scared that with the current status quo, when websites mostly served on chrome start benefiting from the ability to guarantee ad display, that they might start blocking any client that doesn't support it. When that happens we'll start seeing the web degrade in a huge way. This is a huge loss for everyone, I'm very upset with Google for pushing this monopolistic garbage.

ApolloFortyNine 5mo ago

UBlock Origin Lite has been working fine (I had no idea MV2 wasn't actually disabled yet), and uses MV3.

klipklop 5mo ago

For all the folks that proudly say “fine I will use browser X instead!” Don’t you realize the next step is to slowly change chrome so sites will work in chrome, but not other minority browsers? Google is playing the long game. Boil the frogs slowly.

janalsncm 5mo ago

> Meta’s Chief Security Officer resigned the very next day. It would have been very funny if they reassigned him to data labeling too.

Gud 5mo ago

Fuck Google

dbpc 5mo ago

Blocking ads at the network level seems to be the right approach moving forward.

yaro330 5mo ago

uBO lite has been working flawlessly for me for the past couple of years.

RandyOrion 5mo ago

Seems like the affected version of chrome is 150 and 151, and the timewindow is near. Because of ungoogled-chromium, I'm used to manually update the browser. This time I won't update until MV2 problem is solved properly. I've already lost my extensions once by updating to 138 without checking google's adversarial move, and got the forbidden knowledge that I cannot manually downgrade chromium because it won't start.

microflash 5mo ago

What a time! A browser was supposed to be the "user agent". Regardless of what people say about Firefox, I've been using it for uBlock Origin and containers for ages, and won't be trading it for whatever performance, battery life, compatibility gains people continue to use Chrome for. Choose whatever is important for you, though.

joquarky 5mo ago

I don't have an ad blocker. I have two bookmarklets: - remove all IFrames - remove all display:fixed elements Both also use a mutation observer to catch new instances. This takes care of 90% of the annoying ads and cookie popups. To push for more leads into excess complexity for marginal gain.

timbit42 5mo ago
That doesn't block tracking.

627467 5mo ago

I've been using private DNS for couple of years now, almost never miss browser level blocking now

SwamyM 5mo ago

Does anyone use any Firefox forks (Waterfox, Librewolf, etc.) as their primary browser for privacy and performance reasons? I know Zen is fairly popular for it's UI choices but I am interested to see if any of the other options are actually superior to Firefox.

tsoukase 5mo ago

I and I hope many others globally will not care. Since the last months I reverted my browsers from 6-0 in favour of Chrome to 1-5 for Firefox and the one Chrome accesses local adfree sites at work. We are gonna see a revival of Firefox, hopefully like its 2006.

matltc 5mo ago

My approach is ubolite/no script/privacy badger for when I really want chrome. Otherwise I just run Brave. Always brave on mobile since chrome native doesn't support extensions. Seems fine for me. Oh and I set my DNS server to adguard Probably some pixels or whatever get through but I don't have to see ads shrug