Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support current content blockers

Good to hear the reaffirmation from Mozilla that the blocking WebRequest API would be retained. A little over three years ago, Mozilla had promised that it wouldn’t just blindly follow Google on Manifest v3 to the letter. [1]<p>Considering that uBlock Origin works best and can do the most in Firefox with this continuing support, I’m glad Mozilla is still walking the talk on this one.<p>We need at least one browser that makes the web usable, and that might as well be Firefox with uBlock Origin.<p>Edit: Oops. Missed providing the link reference below earlier.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;mozillas-manifest-v3-faq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;mozillas-manifest...</a>

Seeing this in this context just made me realize that it&#x27;s weird to consider them &quot;blockers&quot;, a loaded term. As if we&#x27;re starting from some default, correct state, and then blocking part of it. We&#x27;ve always been able to choose what content we navigate to. These are content selectors&#x2F;choosers, which just support our existing ability to choose what content we request and actions we take.

I switched back to Firefox a while ago, and love it. I keep trying to think of how it could be kept afloat once Google stops funding it.<p>IIRC they get $400 million annually. There are 200 million FF users. $2 each wouldn&#x27;t be bad... But realistically only 1% of the users would donate and $200 is unpalatable.<p>Maybe another organization picks it up and runs it more efficiently or at a loss for advertising?<p>Or...?

The big test is not now, when Chromium discontinues content blockers, but when renewal of the contract with Google is up. For Google there is a big incentive in getting rid of ad blockers, and they have a lot of power over Mozilla being the party that is responsible for most of Mozilla&#x27;s revenue.

This is one thing that has the potential to cause significant numbers of people to switch from Chrome to Firefox. The modern web is unusable without a good ad blocker and its inexplicable to me that it isn&#x27;t a built-in feature enabled by default in every browser like pop-up blocking. You shouldn&#x27;t have to install extensions just to get essential functionality from your browser.

Suddenly Firefox is interesting and Chrome is not. We need to stop thinking of people as users and start thinking them computer owners. Users work when you are sharing a computer, but for installed software, we should think owner instead.

&quot;These weeks in Firefox: issue 124&quot; was referenced in the post, but was not linked.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nightly.mozilla.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-124&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nightly.mozilla.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;these-weeks-in-f...</a>

as a person whohas exclusively used firefox all my life, even on my android, i have both firefox and focus, this is quite good news.<p>the only problem i can imagine is the invisible pressure by the unending desire to become chrome,you know with hiding the search bar by default &quot;because people are used to that from chrome&quot; and other shenanigans, i feel this support might be shortlived because the stupid people managing firefox are paid by google to fuck up firefox in the worst possible way and this just feels another attempt in that regard.<p>btw, i&#x27;ve been online since 2004, daily so i have used a lot of firefox

I&#x27;m feeling nostalgic for the times where monopolies were broken up ...

Good, that&#x27;s why I use Firefox. Still can&#x27;t help but find it strange that ads are called &quot;content&quot; now.

Pihole blocks ads for an entire network, so why does a content blocker have to be built into the browser? Can&#x27;t it just be a separate app you run, outside the browser? Even if the browser is using HTTPS the URL and IP address for everything not from the site you are on is visible. The app could even run as a fake proxy. Scripts would be harder to block if they are sent encrypted, but since you can view the scripts in a browser and hence know the exact content of the script maybe it would be easy to snip them out of the encrypted stream by automatically generating signatures or formulas for what to snip for the scripts from various sites. You could even use an embedded browser in the app to decode and format the entire page, automatically determine what to snip, do the snip, and then forward the modified stream to the users primary web browser (with some delay). Any checksums could be modified appropriately. The app could present a GUI in the primary browser that the user could use to decide what to block. Are the page contents protected by a cryptographic signature? Does not seem like it would matter since the embedded browser certainly has the ability to decrypt everything. Data in the reverse direction could be sent unmodified. Maybe the slowdown caused by filtering everything this way would be unacceptable to users? Some users might find it acceptable in exchange for greater control.

I read somewhere that even though Mozilla will continue supporting the ad blocking API from manifest v2, the rest of manifest v2 will be completely dropped so most of the extensions that I use like greasemonkey will stop working. Is that true?

- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: indicate that DNS is locally overridden by entries in &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts<p>- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: Browser UI: indicate that a domain does not have DNSSEC record signatures<p>- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBT: Browser UI: indicate whether DNS is over classic UDP or DoH, DoT, DoQ (DNS-over-QUIC)<p>- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: browser: indicate that a page is modified by extensions; show a &quot;tamper bit&quot;<p>- [ ] ENH,SEC: Devtools?: indicate whether there are (matching) HTTP SRI Subresource Integrity signatures for any or some of the page assets<p>- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: a &quot;DNS Domain(s) Information&quot; modal_tab&#x2F;panel like the Certificate Information panel

Two easy ways to block trackers and ads... without a firewall.<p>Adding blockers to the hosts table still works with Chrome... hope they don&#x27;t muck with that...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StevenBlack&#x2F;hosts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StevenBlack&#x2F;hosts</a><p>But if they do... there are always DNS solutions you can add to your Router.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io&#x2F;</a><p>I use Firefox, but even things like Windows spams ads at you if you let it. So many things have Google trackers built in too...

The maintainer of uBlock Origin posted a detailed comment about converting from v2 to v3 here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;uBlock-issues&#x2F;issues&#x2F;338#issuecomment-1253893421" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uBlockOrigin&#x2F;uBlock-issues&#x2F;issues&#x2F;338#iss...</a><p>It’s really worth a read to better understand the pros and cons of this new API.

Random note, but I missed the slimmer tabs from Vivaldi and Brave and the older Firefox themes.<p>This works, its just hidden. Says unsupported but works fine in Nightly even so far.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;compact-mode-workaround-firefox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;compact-mode-workaround...</a>

Good. On Windows atleast Firefox is just as fast as Chrome. Even for heavy sites like Twitch&#x2F;Youtube. Ublock origin works the best, vertical tabs from extensions etc so I dont really miss any features. Maybe the Vivaldi F2 command line.<p>Edge is still faster but its good that the default Windows browser is finally good.

why can&#x27;t ublock origin work properly with this manifest v3?

Yeah I mean, they have to. It&#x27;s open source software so it could be forked otherwise and also, if they abandoned this core principle anyway, they would lose their entire user base in droves.<p>There would be no faster way to nuke the entire product. Which is a good thing.

It should content block itself.

How long until Google’s campaign that Firefox is an illegitimate browser

i know that we&#x27;re all sure that even if mozilla reverses this decision, we&#x27;ll have good forks... but, we neeed to be sure to have them on our side... open internet needs people like mozilla

The fact that they&#x27;re even spelling this out means it&#x27;s going to be reversed soonish. Fortunately Firefox (or at least the original iisdea of a lightweight free-as-in-freedom browser) is ready for another fork.

Is Mozilla really trying to juxtapose themselves here against another browser that removes support for power user customization like they don&#x27;t do it? That&#x27;s wild. Is there no one left at Moz that remembers them throwing away the entire ecosystem of XUL based extensions that allowed for many things that current Firefox builds don&#x27;t re: blocking and UI customization.<p>Mozilla literally did this back in the version 37 and only Firefox forks remain to support the full set of extension features. I guess we&#x27;re all amnesiacs or the pot is just being boiled slowly enough to not notice.