Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge

Seems like Microsoft is just taking whatever Chromium releases and repackages it to show more ads and to make Bing the default search engine. In this case, it&#x27;s just dropping support for Manifest V2 extensions, such as uBlock Origin, and moving to Manifest V3, which does not support extensions intercepting and blocking requests using blockingWebRequest.<p>Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you&#x27;re at it, note that &quot;uBlock Origin works best on Firefox&quot;. [2]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;firefox-manifest-v3-adblockers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;firefox-manifes...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-b...</a>

Without ublock origin, the internet is simply unbearable. The result is one of the following two: migrate to Firefox, or the biggest web detox ever

Recently I&#x27;ve been asking myself, what do web browsers and the web look like in twenty years? I&#x27;ve been applying this to all &quot;free&quot; software (e.g., VSCode) released by the large tech companies who ultimately are incentivized by profit.<p>I really have no clue, but as far as I can see the answer is <i>never</i> better. More centralized, more bloated, more invasive, less choice, and less freedom.

Time to go back to Firefox.<p>I switched to Edge on my Windows machine for a while, because that meant that I didn’t need the disk space for an additional browser (same as when just using Safari on Mac) and it was reasonably pleasant and worked well. Guess that’s ending, I liked the DevTools in Firefox a bit more anyways.

It&#x27;s a tradegy antitrust enforcement isn&#x27;t forbidding advertising networks owning &#x2F; having undue influence on browsers.<p>I think this is heading to a point where lot of power users are simply not updating their browsers any more.<p>Personally I&#x27;ll take the miniscule chance of being infected with malware due to a security bug on an older version of Firefox over the inability to run uBlock Origin any day. I can recover from malware installation. I can not use the web without an ad blocker.<p>What I&#x27;ll probably do is use an isolated sandbox environment for any web browsing I need absolute security (e.g. online banking&#x2F;shopping).

&gt; If you use the uBlock Origin extension in Google Chrome or Edge, you should probably start looking for alternative browsers or extensions—either way.<p>I&#x27;ve used Firefox on android for a while as android chrome hasn&#x27;t had adblocking for a long time.<p>Am pretty anti-google these days but it&#x27;ll take some time to untangle myself from the ecosystem.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;ve largely moved back to Firefox on the desktop too, swapped a few icons about so my muscle memory now opens Firefox instead of Chrome and it&#x27;s been totally painless. An easy win.

I&#x27;m going to be honest, but this is a really weird way for Microsoft to announce Edge is EOL and they can&#x27;t afford to even hire two or three more developers to perma-fork Chrome and bring the rest of the Chromium community under one roof, away from Google (who is an extremely bad steward of the project).<p>Shame that Microsoft just chose to no longer have a real browser. Oh well, long live MSIE I guess.

Thorium (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thorium.rocks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thorium.rocks&#x2F;</a>) is a fork of Chromium that maintains a patchset that reverses functional and UI regressions introduced by Google (such as the tabs and menu styling from the 2023 refresh). The author has committed to maintain manifest V2 support for as long as possible.

You can install uBlock Origin Lite [1], and get literally the same blocklists but with better security properties.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;ublock-origin-lite&#x2F;ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;ublock-origin-lite&#x2F;...</a>

This is why Firefox&#x27;s changes are so frustrating[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43203096">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43203096</a>

Honest question since I am not exactly of a skill level that really understands what goes on under the hood of popular browsers, but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to just switching to Firefox.<p>Every time this conversation comes up here and elsewhere, you get a huge swath of comments decrying Mozilla or suggesting Brave instead, which is Chrome in a trenchcoat last I checked. I&#x27;ve used all sorts of browsers over the years, and I keep returning to Firefox, at this point being able to configure it for good level of privacy in less than a minute with each install on a new machine.<p>My experience is perhaps skewed, but I view Google and Microsoft as modern enemies of the Web I want to see happen, perhaps having started off the hero, but living long enough to see themselves become the villain. Their products seem actively and aggressively hostile to users and compliant with websites that demand we use them for &quot;best experience&quot; which, by now we should all know means harvesting our data.<p>Again, I have some ignorance here that needs to be rectified, but where are the true apples to apples comparisons of all browsers so that users can use to evaluate which is best? I don&#x27;t mean just surface level features and marketing woo, but what&#x27;s happening at the code level that allows the developer or websites we visit to treat us like data thralls. Where are the resources to learn about that in these discussions?

If MS continues to support ManifestV2 in edge, I think the usage would increase.<p>Sadly they chose not.

The internet is unusable without uBlock. At this point I don&#x27;t have a browser preference, I only have a uBlock preference. I&#x27;ll use whatever browser that has good uBlock support.

The day my webbrowser cannot run an adblocker anymore is the day I&#x27;m saying goodbye to the www.<p>Together with the recent FF news, this is terrible news for the open, user-controlled web.

I have been on firefox since forever. Not quite sure why people would even bother with Edge unless of course its the &quot;approved&quot; browser in your org.

Firefox is still here for you, folks. It&#x27;s been here the whole time and it&#x27;s been great.

There is no way uBlock Origin users suddenly accept seeing ads. They will switch browsers.

uBlock Origin always worked best in Firefox anyhow:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-b...</a>

The current boat I am on is relying on Firefox for most of my devices: Windows Laptops, Android Phones&#x2F;Tablets with Ublock Origin and NextDNS set over DNS mode for all of the devices in my family.<p>For iDevices relying on Orion Browser paired with Ublock Origin and NextDNS set up. As good as Safari but without the annoyances of Plugins. Their compatablity mode seems to work on sites where Safari seems to have issues.<p>Ungoggled Chromium for sites that seem to break on both Firefox and Orion, unfortunately there are loads out there. It&#x27;s a shame that Firefox isn&#x27;t as effecient with Battery Consumption as Orion is.<p>Brave&#x2F;Edge just never cut it for me.

I think that we&#x27;ll need to adopt network-level filtering if we want to outsmart the browsers. I haven&#x27;t looked back since adopting NextDNS and configuring my router to filter all traffic through it. It does a great job of stripping ads out of all my devices connected to it, and that&#x27;s something I don&#x27;t mind paying a few bucks for a year (I think it&#x27;s like $19&#x2F;year).<p>Check it out here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io&#x2F;</a>

FreeTube works very well for watching YT videos. They have adblock and sponsorblock. You can subscribe without logging in. You stay out of the ecosystem as it were.<p>This is a cat and mouse game. The overarching issue here is the web embraced the monoculture of Chromium as the basis for browsers. Can we really expect any less?<p>I&#x27;ve had good success with Violent Monkey and scripts from Greasy Fork on every browser I run, which is Edge (work becoz SSO), Chrome, and Firefox. They have never been detected.

Safari + Wipr is perfect and fast.

I&#x27;ve moved to using systemwide Adguard on my home PCs and Macs. It&#x27;s not a solution for work devices (my employer doesn&#x27;t have ads on internal websites so this is not much of an issue), but it frees me from worrying about browser APIs and having to copy my custom filters to every single browser I want to use.

I still somewhat miss the old Edge(trident-based). IME it worked perfectly on low power netbooks.

For users who will miss custom filtering in uBlock Origin, AdGuard supports custom filtering and is compatible with Manifest V3. Custom filter lists from uBlock Origin can be imported into AdGuard. However, AdGuard lacks the element picker function.

&gt;We are deprecating the blocking version of the webRequest API. This required extensions to proxy all network traffic to provide filtering capabilities, which came at a performance and privacy cost. The new declarativeNetRequest API provides a safer alternative for many use cases.<p>This is from manifest v3 google page. Is this declarativeNetRequest API not able to provide any filtration ? Proxying traffic does affect privacy, I agree, but that also means that Google is trusting all traffic by default which is another privacy concern. So the privacy concern seems to not make sense except that in one of the two, google loses money because of ads being blocked.

Serious question: Would it not be possible to build an adblocker that is not browser based but installable? The browsers control what they allow to be loaded (extensions, add-ons). They are forever changing internally. If the blocking was outside the browser, they could do nothing about it. Yes, a type of proxy perhaps, whereby the stream was filtered. Could a type of uBO or similar be created that has lists to filter all traffic through the program?

Anyone have suggestions for which other browser is best for power saving? I’ve been using Edge on my Surface as it seemed much better on the battery than Chrome.

What&#x27;s a good Webkit browser to switch to that supports ad blocking?<p>Don&#x27;t want to use Firefox, too many rendering bugs and performance issues we&#x27;ve run into.

Is the timing only a coincidence, with Mozilla pulling another of its multiple-personality-disorder moves?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43200065">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43200065</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43201096">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43201096</a><p>There really isn&#x27;t a trustworthy Web browser anymore.

As one of the few (only?) HN users who uses Edge, I&#x27;ll wait until this actually reaches the mainline Edge build. If it even does. And then, I&#x27;ll evaluate the Manifest V3 compatible ad blockers. And if those are inadequate, I&#x27;ll switch to another browser. But I&#x27;m expecting that, as always, this is largely a nonexistent scenario.

I just moved my main browser on Android to Edge using the uBlock Origin installation trick. It will not have a happy ending as I hoped. I will consider moving away from Edge on my PC now.<p>Sadly, I still cannot add custom filters to uBlock Lite.

they want to track your ass, whatever it costs.

Does anyone know if any of the Firefox forks avoid this problem? Librewolf, Waterfox, etc. I know this might not be a long-term solution if Firefox continues to degrade, but it does seem like a valid short term measure.

Edge is only good for its support of cleartype on Windows. Now it&#x27;s nothing.

Does anyone have (educated) qualms about ungoogled chromium? I started using it on a whim awhile ago, and it works great on MacOS and Linux for me with uBlock installed.

Speaking of Edge, every so often it resets by default search engine to Bing (from Kagi), and it requires about 10 clicks in a well hidden away setting to restore it.

I’ve not followed this issue with ad blockers being blocked. Is there any legitimate reason for this or is it just a corrupt change from big tech?

This arms race between users and ad companies is lost. The users have lost utterly.<p>We DO have an ace up our sleeves should we choose to use it:<p><i>Stop using any of it</i>

I gave up and started using ControlD instead of uBlock or PiHole. It&#x27;s been great and well worth the price. Clean, fast page loads.

agenda--&gt;<p>next: kernel code deployment _MUST_ go thru them, namely internet or offline storage for clients paying more (A LOT more).<p>next: app installation _MUST_ go thru their store (or the ones from their big tech friends).<p>next: &quot;validated&quot; hardware will have to have _NOT_ &quot;secure boot&quot; you can disable.<p>And now we have a &quot;MicrosoftStation&quot;, the new video game console.

Today I moved from Firefox &amp; DuckDuckGo to Orion + Kagi.<p>After 21 years of Firefox, that was rather bitter goodbye moment.

Not surprising since they&#x27;re gearing up to inject ads into their office suite (free tier anyway)

TIL people are using Edge.

LibreWolf.

Lazy web reminder try Brave or Arc. Ladybird is also looking promising

Gotta admire the way they worded the dialog box.<p>&quot;uBlock Origin was turned off. This extension is no longer supported. Edge recommends that you remove it.&quot;<p>I have a few decades of experience with the Internet, and even I understood the dialog box as saying that Ublock didn&#x27;t work anymore. In reality, as the text says, it still works if you click &quot;Manage Extension&quot; and turn it back on.<p>This infuriates me.

Well I guess that will be the last time I use edge. KUNTZ

this is funny. This is an opportunity for Microsoft (and other browsers) to gain some marketshare&#x2F;goodwill and they fumble it.

Time to put a dns sinkhole on your network

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Oldest play in the Microsoft book.<p>I sincerely think Microsoft can&#x27;t be trusted.

Firefox is an alternative, just saying.

Meh, a piece of shit browser that I never use just got a bit shittier and less worthy of using, if such were possible. One company that takes user hostility to special levels.

You guys are using Edge?