PSA: uBlock/AdBlocks on Chrome to lose function thanks to Manifestv3

Discussed most recently 2 days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29502439" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29502439</a>

Granular control over requests is completely lost in Manifest V3.<p>For example, with Manifest V2 we can initiate a request from a content script after we begin listening for it from the background script, pass a single-use token in the Accept header, identify the request from the background script based on the token, remove the token from the Accept header and edit other headers before the request is sent to the server, then manipulate the response for that <i>single request</i> and stop listening from the background script.<p>I use this workflow in Search by Image to grab an image from the page context when no CSP headers are present for the asset, and the image is only served if a certain cookie and referrer is sent. This will no longer be possible to achieve with the current API of Manifest V3. Extensions used for page archival will also be impacted.<p>Manifest V3 removes a robust toolset that content blockers can use the react to all evasion techniques ad companies implement, and the rest of the extension ecosystem will be part of the fallout.

One of the interesing things about this story is that there appears to be no consideration of not &quot;updating&quot; to a new Chrome version. The idea of user choice in &quot;updating&quot; is completely absent. Why cannot a user say, &quot;V3 sounds wonderful but I will stick with V2, thank you.&quot; A user has a version of a program that works for that user (e.g., with uBlock Origin), and Google can apparently forcibly stop that user from using that working version, through a process of &quot;automatic updates&quot;. Users must &quot;accept&quot; updates which makes one wonder Google can pull this off. Does it not rely on user behaviour. By accepting every &quot;update&quot; without question, the user is effectively consenting to being controlled.<p>Perhaps users will someday &quot;wake up&quot; to realise that so-called updates are not necessarily being remotely installed for their benefit, but for the benefit of someone else. No doubt Google has some parallel construction type explanation why users need V3, but how many folks cannot see that they are letting the fox guard the henhouse.<p>Perhaps if ads can be blocked, so too can updates. (IME, it&#x27;s possible.)

Just boycott Chrome, as a user and as a developer. And boycott any other Chromium-based browser altogether.<p>The only reason why a mediocre ads company like Google is managing to mess up the web is that it has &gt;90% of the browser&#x27;s market share, if you include all Chromium-based browsers.<p>If they can periodically break the basic functionalities of web extensions however they like (HTTP calls within extensions, background scripts, ability to manipulate the DOM...) just to ensure that people won&#x27;t manage to block ads and trackers, and they still get developers to build stuff for their browser and they don&#x27;t lose a single user, they can really get away with EVERYTHING.<p>Time to let them know that they can&#x27;t really get away with everything. Google has been an evil company beyond redemption and with a net negative added value to the industry for too long and now it deserves to go down. MV3 should be the reason why developers should stop building extensions for Chrome, users should stop using Chrome, and other browsers should move to other web engines than Chromium.<p>If nobody follows Google in their efforts to push for MV3, then we&#x27;ll be left with a limited browser with limited functionalities and nearly no extensions. Let Google sink in their own sh*t.

If you are on a Mac, I suggest that you try Orion browser (currently in beta) [1]. It is based on WebKit, with a custom port of web extensions API [2].<p>Not only that it runs Chrome and Firefox web extensions like uBlock Origin but we will be keeping support for Manifest v2.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.kagi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.kagi.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.kagi.com&#x2F;WebExtensions-API-Support.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.kagi.com&#x2F;WebExtensions-API-Support.html</a>

For all the claims that the sky is falling, I&#x27;d like to know which functionality is still missing in declarativeNetRequest. Extended rule limits, dynamic rules, and header modification have been added. What else is required for a functional adblocker?<p>This reddit thread barely seems to understand the issue, never mind the technical deficiencies of the API.

How about posting what we’re losing for those out of the loop. That Reddit link is pretty useless.

This link is useless for people who do not know what manifest v3 is.<p>Here is a actual source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;extensions&#x2F;mv3&#x2F;intro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;extensions&#x2F;mv3&#x2F;intro&#x2F;</a><p>Much better article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;chrome-users-beware-ma...</a>

FYI Brave Browser doesn&#x27;t intend on deprecating Manifest v2 and the blocking version of the webRequest API[0]. A discussion has even started on whether to stand up their own extension marketplace[1]<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-chromes-anti-ad-blocker-changes-despite-shared-codebase&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-...</a><p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brave&#x2F;brave-browser&#x2F;issues&#x2F;15187" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brave&#x2F;brave-browser&#x2F;issues&#x2F;15187</a>

Not saying this is good enough, but there&#x27;s still 12 months before this needs to happen?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mv2-transition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mv2-transition&#x2F;</a><p>&gt; As we look to the future by continuing to iterate on and improve upon Manifest V3 functionality, we also want to share details about the plan to phase out Manifest V2 extensions.<p>&gt; There are two key dates for the phase-out:<p>&gt; January 17, 2022: New Manifest V2 extensions will no longer be accepted by the Chrome Web Store. Developers may still push updates to existing Manifest V2 extensions, but no new Manifest V2 items may be submitted.<p>&gt; January 2023: The Chrome browser will no longer run Manifest V2 extensions. Developers may no longer push updates to existing Manifest V2 extensions.

Fuck. Just when I got used to Chromium due its nice profiles feature.<p>Sigh. Back to Firefox then. Or perhaps I should just stop using the web for anything except the necessities. Now that I think about it, that would probably make my life better in more than one way.

Like the EFF said, Chrome is a Google agent not a user agent. Switch to Firefox on desktop and mobile.

The end game on this is that there will be browsers that support ad blocking and browsers that don&#x27;t. Content vendors will go all out on blocking users that don&#x27;t use their preferred mandatory ads browsers, and the &#x27;web&#x27; as we know it will suffer.

Time and time again I try to switch to Firefox. But it always seems to fall short (for me at least).<p>I rely too much on separate profiles to disconnect work-related browsing from personal browsing. Separate bookmarks, sessions, browser plugins, sync preferences etc...<p>A UI that&#x27;s as powerful is literally all that is needed for me anyway. Its such a shame they&#x27;ve neglected the Profile Manager.

Fuck. I&#x27;m getting too old for this shit. The cat and mouse game of Google &#x2F; AdTech vs the general public has gone off the deep end. Popups. Popovers. Popunders. Content shifting. Paywalls. GDPR Alert! Chatbots. Can I send you a Cookie? Ok. Can I help you find something? No. <i>Wait!</i> Don&#x27;t close the page yet! Coupon code? No. Subscribe to our newsletter? No. Autoplaying video. How To Make A Million Bucks A Month Selling On Amazon! You Can Be A Handsome Guy On A Beach Making Money Just Like Me! For. Fucks. Sake.<p>I just want to use the web to access a few of my favorite news sites, use Github, access documentation, watch the (very) occasional YouTube vid, and send email. Am I a dying breed? A mere rounding error in the pie chart of web users? Maybe.<p>But I am truly at a loss for what to do next. Using the internet without uBO is like sticking needles into my eyeballs. &quot;Switch to Firefox!&quot; they said. I&#x27;ve tried, many times. But I really need some simple things that FF can&#x27;t provide. Like being able to work with JXA to grab tab URLs for some Alfred scripts and other automations I rely heavily on. There&#x27;s a <i>20-year old feature request</i> for this[0].<p>Ok, Brave then? Probably the best option right now, but it keeps me up at night thinking one day Google will actively start going after the forks, making their lives difficult enough in one way or another to the point that they have to shut down.<p>Safari? I haven&#x27;t checked in a while but there were some critical extensions that just didn&#x27;t exist last time I checked- things like Rich URL[1] for copying tabs as markdown (so useful!). Dev tools were meh.<p>Just feels like there aren&#x27;t any good options. Rock and hard place. Google, enough is enough—<i>why are you doing this?</i> (rhetorical. we know why)<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=125419" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=125419</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;rich-url&#x2F;bkjdcppkdgccnhjibfhlhmeiafnjfamk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;rich-url&#x2F;bkjdcppkd...</a>

I come from the Mozilla Suite then Phoenix era of times and I am still glad I never switched to Chrome as my main browser.

I remember a time when Google used to crank out a seemingly endless stream of stuff that basically were tremendous improvements to the internet.<p>Chrome itself was one of those amazing improvements.<p>These days are long gone it seems.<p>As a matter of fact, the exact opposite seems to be happening right now: every change coming out of a Google seems to improve their lot at the detriment of everyone else, especially their users.<p>The time to ditch Chrome was ~5 years ago, but if you aren&#x27;t convinced yet, this latest &quot;improvement&quot; should be the straw that breaks the donkey&#x27;s back.

I&#x27;ll probably switch to a system-wide adblocker like Adguard. It&#x27;s already a life-saver on Android.

It seems the chrome team has been fabricating a hostage situation with their own foot for the past year or two. They keep yelling that they&#x27;ll shoot it any day now, yet we don&#x27;t seem any closer to it.<p>I wish them the courage to finally pull the trigger.

Does this affect Brave?

Is Privacy Badger affected as well? (how is Privacy Badger different from uBlock?)

This is why I switched back to Firefox three years ago. The writing was on the wall for ad blockers in Chrome. I want one that works. I want control over my web experience.

Firefox is absolutely fantastic nowadays, and I strongly encourage everyone to start using it as their primary browser. It&#x27;s hard to overstate how important it is to have at least two independent browser implementations around.<p>If Firefox dies then Chromium would become the de facto rendering engine, and we&#x27;ll no longer have any meaningful specification for web standards. The web will simply be whatever Chromium does including all its quirks. We&#x27;ve already seen the horrors of that back in the days of IE.<p>Furthermore, Google is fundamentally an ads company and it should not be the gatekeeper for the internet. I highly recommend reading a recent antitrust filing regarding how Google has worked with Facebook and Microsoft to discourage them from increasing user privacy<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.nysd.564903&#x2F;gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0_1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.nysd.56...</a><p>Google has a secret deal with Facebook called &quot;Jedi Blue&quot; that they knew was illegal and has a whole section describing how they&#x27;ll cover for each other if anyone finds out. Google has a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation.<p>Google had a plan called &quot;Project NERA&quot; to turn the web into a walled garden they called &quot;Not Owned But Operated&quot;. A core component of this was the forced logins to the chrome browser you&#x27;ve probably experienced.<p>Google is willing to do almost everything to prevent people from circumventing their ad exchanges which is what AMP is all about. Google habitually does insider trading on their ad exchanges in every way possible.<p>The exchanges are also rigged so that google wins on bids where they aren&#x27;t the highest bidder. A large amount of people inside Google are aware of all of this.<p>Google has worked with Facebook and Microsoft to discourage them from increasing user privacy, lamenting occasions where they prioritized their reputation over their collective business interest.

[citation needed]<p>Last time I checked, the author was going to attempt a port of uBlock to Manifest v3:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ntlgkv&#x2F;comment&#x2F;h0snbbn&#x2F;?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ntlgkv&#x2F;commen...</a>

How long until Google pulls funding for Firefox to kill the browser so that ad blocking becomes impossible across the board?

Is there anything that can be done about this?<p>I&#x27;m down to email someone, put up a banner on my website or call, I don&#x27;t know.

profiles are my number one reason for using chrome as well.<p>i need them because of my bookmarks. i have close to 6000 bookmarks. 20 years and counting of curated and tagged web links. chrome syncs them across all my devices. i have to do the import gymnastics once in a while for edge and safari. but that&#x27;s it.<p>why are bookmarks still browser-specific and not a OS-level feature? why do we need all that import&#x2F;export gymnastic?<p>bookmarks are links to web sites, apps, or pages. they should have never been browser-specific. i want to be able to access them from all my devices. they should have been like my photos, or my music collection. and yet, they are not...

For Microsoft to really rain on Google’s parade here, don’t all they have to do is allow V2 compliant extensions into their extension store? If so that would be a grand opportunity.

Will PiHole(so?) be able to block ads before chrome can render them or will these Manifestv3 changes break pages from loading?

I&#x27;m pretty happy with my switch to Brave half a year ago.<p>Was a bit rough around the edges at the beginning, but it got quite good.

Brave for life it is I guess.

FYI, Manifest v3 is also coming to Firefox browser.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;27&#x2F;manifest-v3-update&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;27&#x2F;manifest-v3-updat...</a>

Good. Maybe some people will drop Chrome now.

WTF is PSA

*Off-topic:* I&#x27;ve experimented with a new layout in Firefox, and now I can&#x27;t think of going back.<p>I first installed Tree Style Tab. I then removed the tabs at the top of the window and added a permanent status bar to the bottom of the window using userChrome.css: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;PIONywj.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;PIONywj.png</a> (edited to add, my userChrome.css: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;anthonyclarka2&#x2F;155c038de96e91894cbd4ba15ee03c86" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;anthonyclarka2&#x2F;155c038de96e91894cbd4...</a> ) (EDIT: I added some extra css to this to set the titlebar and system UI buttons - use the first revision if you don&#x27;t want that)<p>The tree style tabs are wonderful. I can see a grouping of tabs, see which tab is the &quot;parent&quot; of a bunch of pages. I often have a root tab with Jira current sprint, then a ticket sub item, then branching from that I have various documentation and github pages open. All of those pages together form one mental &quot;unit&quot; of related information and work.<p>I&#x27;m sorry to post this in a somewhat unrelated thread, but I&#x27;m geeked out by how well this works! Firefox is better for my needs anyway, because I can tag bookmarks. Much easier to find saved pages through searching tags for &quot;emacs, babel, python&quot; for instance. Or &quot;firefox, tabs, css&quot;<p>*On-topic:* This move by Google is going to lose them a ton of browser users, I think. People love blocking ads! Especially tech-minded folk, who are often asked to recommend software or repair things for less knowledgeable or comfortable people.<p>I&#x27;d also like to see a Chromium fork that continues to allow the Manifest V2 API.

Color me shocked.<p>Why does anyone use Chrome anymore? Firefox is better in every way, and it isn’t tied to the biggest data harvester the world has ever known.

Are people really that adamant about blocking ads on the web? I don&#x27;t understand why people think it&#x27;s a good idea to remove the primary source of revenue for content creators. At the most it amounts to a very mild annoyance and ads also help small businesses to grow.<p>Edit: I&#x27;d appreciate it if someone could respond to the points I made rather than simply complain about why they don&#x27;t like ads.