Privacy

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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads (www.windowscentral.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Google's campaign against ad blockers across its services just got more aggressive. According to a report by PC World, the company has made some alterations to its extension support on Google Chrome.

Google Chrome recently changed its extension support from the Manifest V2 framework to the new Manifest V3 framework. The browser policy changes will impact one of the most popular adblockers (arguably), uBlock Origin.

The transition to the Manifest V3 framework means extensions like uBlock Origin can't use remotely hosted code. According to Google, it "presents security risks by allowing unreviewed code to be executed in extensions." The new policy changes will only allow an extension to execute JavaScript as part of its package.

Over 30 million Google Chrome users use uBlock Origin, but the tool will be automatically disabled soon via an update. Google will let users enable the feature via the settings for a limited period before it's completely scrapped. From this point, users will be forced to switch to another browser or choose another ad blocker.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (9 children)

Are chromium derivatives like Brave affected?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Sadly yes. Almost all, if not all derivates are affected since they inherit the codebase from it. Unless they implement manual Manifest v2 patches + have their own extension store they manage

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

So that basically means that Firefox and Safari are the only two unaffected, since it seems like everything else is Chromium these days. Yikes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Vivaldi said they will keep V2 support. Not forever, but as long as they are able.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

So for a little bit until people stop caring.

Firefox is the correct play here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'm not saying what's "the correct play" or not, I'm refuting the claim all Chromium-based browsers are immediately affected, because I know of at least one that will keep V2 support.

But I will keep using Vivaldi. It will take me the same time to migrate to Firefox regardless if I do it today or a year from now when Vivaldi drops V2 support. I have nothing to gain by migrating sooner, but potentially much to gain by waiting.

Vivaldi might decide to keep support indefinitely,
Vivaldi might decide to update the built-in ad blocker to use UBlock Origin tech,
Google might backtrack the decision (hah!),
a whole different browser I want to try might come out in the meantime and I'd have to migrate twice,
Firefox might die after losing Google funding due to the monopoly ruling.
I will build a new PC in a year and it will be a good time for a software refresh,
Or, the most likely, none of this will happen, and I will migrate to Firefox then, if that's the best move at the time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Not for everyone. For me it's unusable since I rely on stuff ff never implemented (using bluetooth from a web page to configure some of my home appliances, grab api keys for them, stuff like that). Also I'm not too thrilled that it laks any kind of official PWA or Chromecast support. Not to mention they still have some ugly bugs when rendering some gradients.

And besides this, I used to love everything Mozilla did, but at one point I grew to hate how they left ff to stagnate which made me switch.

I still reconsider it from time to time, but I always get disappointed by how little things have changed and how much even more things seem to be missing/buggy since the last time.

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