Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 - June 2026 (450 comments)
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.
> Update: As of v1.81, we host the following Manifest V2 (MV2) extensions on Brave’s backend: AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix, NoScript. These extensions operate independently from the equivalent versions that are currently present on the Chrome Web Store, and have to be downloaded separately. Users can download and enable these 4 extensions from the brave://settings/extensions/v2 page.
Mozilla is extremely friendly to content blockers, and does everything they can to make sure they are well supported as first class citizens.
That being said, agree that this is a horrible move and we are paying the consequences of it due to the huge market Chromium-browsers occupy. I'm a Firefox user as well, but it is really slow in adopting latest web features and I won't hold my breath for a shiny future, in regards Mozilla. Maybe there is a shiny future, maybe there is not.
At family gatherings, in their computers, it's all Google Chrome. No adblocks whatsoever. They got "used to" seeing ads everywhere. I personally can't. Web is literally unusable for me without it. I try my best to install adblocks in their devices. Most of the time, making them use Firefox is out of the question, as they are tied and "used to" Chrome profile sync and don't want to log in their pages once again, etc. My mom got me luckily, and I got her Brave with all branding, sponsored and crypto non-sense disabled. Otherwise, she's the perfect target for incorrectly clicking through a sponsored post in a google search, or similar popups and stuff in other websites, resulting in deceive behavior.
This is the worst of it, actually. It's not just "commercial ads". Sometimes, it's just deceiving behavior, manipulating people's opinions, and making them feel in a particular way to do god knows what.
WebKit being forced down to iOS user's throat is also that should not happen, but we as society for consented to it. We can say that this is the only thing holding Chromium to become pure havok. Although ublock is available there, is it in their "lite" format, same as Chromium. So, not the full uBlock that we should be getting...
There's also a part where we should blame ourselves as culture for letting all these things to slide without doing anything for it. Microsoft got sued by the US in 2001 for an antitrust case for leveraging Internet Explorer through their Windows monopoly in PC market. We have it so much worse today, and no one seems to bat an eye. I know things are far more complex compared to the past, but hey, due to it, we should have more strict systems in place to prevent these anti-people behavior.
Ladybird is a welcome addition to the scene. Hopefully something beautiful comes out of them in the next couple of years.
They don't boil you fast, because they can't: you would balk at that.
In other words, taken together, they do all they can to boil you on that issue and kill ad-blockers.
Yesterday I wanted to get a brave search api key on the free tier and they require a credit card even for that. That pissed me off a bit but still gonna test the browser a little bit more. Firefox is really pissing me off and I don't want to keep using it forever just because there is no other browser engine. Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable.
But its obvious that these guys are semi shady and they will show sooner or later. I liked chrome derviates and used them over a decade. I got tired of feeling forced to switch after vivaldi/brave so I went the firefox way last year.
The circle is completed.
i dont know, firefox is very buggy and unstable, crashes or just log me out of everything every few weeks, we dont really have great choices, wishful thinking, but i hope brave straightened up
While I cannot be sure, I assume that is the cause of the general slowdown I experience as well.
Restarting Firefox will fix free up the memory & fix the slowness. I do still use it as my primary browser despite these issues.
That last one was the killer difference for me. Firefox wants me to be able to see (at least part of) the title of each tab, even if that means I can't see all my tabs at once. I want to see all of my tabs at once, and I don't care if I can see the title - the favicon is enough.
I did try configuring Firefox to let me shrink the tabs more, and even tried messing with its GTK configuration, but no luck.
So I do feel a bit bad for using Brave instead of Firefox, but after months of dealing with Firefox's UI I lost patience.
And the devtools are nowhere near comparable to Chrome's, although I admit this might be a matter of personal experience.
Does Mozilla have a contract with Google to not build one in as part of the search contract?
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...
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://www.firefox.com/en-US/mobile/focus/
The only thing I use Firefox on iOS for *is* its ad blocker.
This Firefox Focus on iOS does effectively block adds on a recipe site unlike plain Firefox. I just did a cursory head to head test on the same recipe site url.
Thank you for sharing this!
If free computing and user control are a priority for you, consider switching to GrapheneOS. You get better security than iOS, a UI/UX that does not assume you are mildly retarded, and full freedom to run any program from any source, including IronFox (a hardened Firefox fork).
[0]: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/10742158329613-W...
Yup, huge red flag. Non-profit is the long-term way to go.
So will be interesting to see how many other browsers actually do keep this support alive.
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.
They do built in Adblock that keeps up in the YT arms race. If they’re losing and I get an ad I restart the browser and we’re winning again.
It does lack elemental control of the DOM to manipulate pages on the user chrome, but dev tools is there. Though there are some CSS rendering options in a drop down like inverted colors and sepia and such. You can screenshot any page section with its screenshot tool.
Video controls can be shown on any image/video element with a right click.
Incredibly configurable. It offers email, RSS feeds, profiles. Exposed and granular user privacy controls in the settings window.
Its open image in new tab is pretty consistent, though some sites pull all the tricks and it’s just impossible to get the image (looking at you Reddit)
Their business model is a cookie swap on purchases made through their built in speed dial options. That doesn’t happen if you don’t click on them directly.
They could honestly stand to be fully transparent about that in the browser UI in the wake of Honey. I for one would love a popup that says “using this link sets us as the affiliate for this purchase. Thank you for supporting the development of your Vivaldi browser”
It also seems to happen if you type the domain name in the address bar but hit enter when the suggested URL autofills. For me, typing out aliexpress.com fully will send me directly to AE, but typing aliexpress.c and hitting enter (with the autofill completing "om") redirects through vivaldi.com/bk/aliexpresscom-us
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").
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.
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.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/googles-next-chrome-update-will-f...
Actually, I'll take that back. I used to see far more stuff get blocked (e.g., when clicking links) than with Lite. Which is to say, Lite feels like it has fewer false positives.
For instance:
> Last year, Google/YouTube ramped up its efforts against ad-blockers, preventing playback for users with the software installed on their devices, coercing them to disable it.
Users continued to exploit loopholes in browsers and third-party extensions, such as Firefox, that allowed them to bypass YouTube's ads while watching videos. However, the tech giant has seemingly doubled down on its efforts against ad-blockers, closing the few remaining loopholes
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/streaming-video...
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.
OTOH it's not out of the question that some open source non-extension Chrome mod emerges that will then block those kinds of ads. Brave is already shipping this anyway.
MV3 specifically forbids remotely hosted 'code', which apparently filter lists are.
"Closing the door" on ad blockers is quite an exaggeration.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
They didn't just "switch". They had to fundamentally change how they block ads and the new version the adtech company forced upon everyone...drumroll...is less effective at blocking ads. What a coincidence!
Per uBlock:
>uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage because many filters can't be converted into DNR rules
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
There is a limit on how large the list can be, depending on the browser.
Apples to oranges, scripts need an entire browser/Interpeter framework underneath it to even function
I'm actually more curious to hear what sites it doesn't do a good job on.
For many sites, especially news sites, I toggle javascript off. It's reasonably easy to do per site in chrome (click left of location bar and "site settings"). I don't know if there is an easy way to do this per site in firefox.
So far I've stuck with chrome for a few reasons:
- Mozilla doesn't implement desktop PWA and has cancelled the project. I use this. - Mozilla was using about twice as much memory as chrome. (I need to revisit this, Chrome seems to have gotten fatter.) - Safari is a royal pain to write your own extensions (last I checked you need to create an application and bundle the extension into it). - I like the multiple profiles in Chrome to sandbox things like my google login. There may be a firefox equivalent, however.
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.
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.
[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/document-pict...
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/element-captu...
And that automatically disqualifies it? I find that wild. I've been using Firefox since it was at v2 I think, and never once considered switching for some speed gain. I actually use Vivaldi on the side sometimes for sites that aren't very Firefox-with-my-extensions-friendly, and find no difference in performance.
(Personally I find Firefox is plenty fast! And the benefits vastly outweigh trying to deal with a Google-powered web browser.)
This is no longer the case, at least not uniformly. My Speedometer 3.1 results are:
- Chromium: 30.0 (± 1.2)
- Firefox: 32.1 (± 1.6)
Using the latest browser version on Arch Linux.
IIRC, it's got a much smaller memory footprint.
You can start with this page[4] for an examples of simple, but elegant styling.
And /r/FirefoxCSS can demonstrate all kinds of crazy options userChome.css enthusiasts can come up with.
[1] https://www.userchrome.org/
[2] https://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserChrome.css
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/wiki/index/tutorials
[4] https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html...
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/...
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...
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 upfrontLikewise, I desperately want to stay on windows because of anticheat, but every year they keep making it harder.
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!
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
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?
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...
This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.
Have people actually noticed worse performance from uBlock Origin lite?
This article isn't nuanced enough. Ad blockers will continue to work.
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.
Employees at companies using corporate computers love a good malicious popup, right?
Now, if there were just an LLM browser that would fetch a page, strip the ads, and serve me that…
Use anything with built-in adblock-rust.
Well this is a wake-up call folks, time to switch away from that abomination.
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.
News at 11.
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
(also, 450+ comments is not little notice!)
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.
I told you all that Chrome doesn't crash, FF does + pages work much slower.
You can delay that by selecting the app in the settings and choosing its Battery setting to Unrestricted, however, despite its name, it will still get suspended
The checks are poorly coded. Even on Unrestricted, if you play music from a web player, the browser will get suspended after the song ends but before a new one starts playing because there's a point where it awaits data on the foreground task, Android sees it has no background tasks and suspends it.
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/8932
That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases
People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive"
If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla
If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows
Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google
By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive
But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open"
Except they will not mention the money from Google part
Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist"
This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads
Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox
[0[ https://github.com/glide-browser/glide
Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".
All that I care about is that I do not see a single ad in or on anything while I browse. It's a fight but firefox makes it doable.
I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.
Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%.
If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort.
We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.
It would be possible for a surge in contributors to bring it back up to a double digit percentage, but I don't think manifest v3 is going to be the catalyst for that.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?
The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)
It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.
It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.
Lots of products and services have small market share and are better than the market leaders.
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.
Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude.
Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing.
>That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars
And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now?
They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.
So if you really don't want to ever see ads again, you need something at the application layer.
Or Firefox pulling in a ton of anti-fingerprinting measures from the Tor team. Not even worth talking about anti-fingerprinting as a serious consideration in Chrome.
Rust - a mozilla effort that resulted in code from servo being pulled into Firefox - chrome is headed that way too.
Even WASM was definitely a security improvement over NaCL, and Mozilla also led the way on Flash replacements in the day, making one of the first JS flash players (in the end, the solution was no more flash, but hey, at least they tried).
Font sanitisation - originally a mozilla security effort...
I feel I could go on and on.
That's on the desktop. I don't know about the situation on Android, but my impression was the codebases are pretty similar these days.
Where did you get the idea there was no sandboxing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...
They laid off 320 people that year. If she had taken a salary of $0 they could have paid them each <$10k with that salary.
I don't think the salary was appropriate, but like a lot of these CEO compensation things, it's not going to make a huge difference to the final problem. Which was people switching to Chrome which google was pushing aggressively everywhere. ... and I guess purists here abandoning them for... Chrome? Again, no idea what the point is here. Mozilla has flaws, so screw 'em?
Surprised I'm so much downvoted.
Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.
Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...
A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.
They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.
Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.
I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support.
And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.
Anything Chromium based is tainted. They will not be able to keep out all of Google's shitty decisions because they are not building a browser, they are building a skin on top of somebody else's browser.
Edit: Someone on Reddit compiled a list of various fuckups. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...
It's nonetheless the thing you can overwhelmingly trust the most in the long run.
1) I think it's well established (or perhaps not well established enough) that "non-profit" is the only way to go for base level computing things like this. Profit motive (as distinguishable from "keep the lights on money," e.g. with Wikipedia) makes you do unnecessary and often harmful experimentation.
2) It's a fork of the thing you're trying to beat. Now, that may not be a deal-killer, but given Chrome's dominance, getting outside of that entirely seems smarter.