For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
I look forward to the slight bump in Mozilla userbase.
laughs in Firefox/Librewolf
No worries, play store-recaptcha is coming for you too!
?
affects mobile the most obviously… but google’s playbook is to basically have forced telemetry always and enforce integrity of their telemetry, and by extension advertising etc.
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/07/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement/ - this just seems like an ok article for it, I did a simple web search and it came up, but others certainly exist if you dislike the source.
Looking forward to when they remove the old options & force PC users to scan reCAPTCHA QRs:
Those sites will be dead to me :)
QR codes are like the popups of days gone by. With incredibly few exceptions, I refuse to scan them. They are so easy to redirect for nefarious purposes, and you can’t easily inspect the url to know, assuming thats something you even do. Also my phone case covers the camera and it’s a bitch to get open so I’m very choosy with what gets camera time.
On my phone I use URLCheck (available in f-droid). You set it as your default browser app, but instead of opening a browser, it opens a popup where you can see the URL, and use some useful tools like removing tracking parameters or automatically rewriting x.com to xcancel.com. The rewritten URL can then just be forwarded to your actual browser (or whatever app is set up to handle that particular URL).
I still won’t actually open random qr code URLs though, especially not ones from google.
Thats new. Thank you for the tip. Installed!
How do the rewrites work? Is it like Redirector?
Would be awesome if I could just import my Redirector regex json file
After doing that, do you have an option to select which application you want to run (browser, video player etc?)
I use Open Link With, but would love to be able to edit the URL before.
Edit: From the description I think it might do that. This is neat, thanks for the recommendation.
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Unfortunately, we’re fighting an uphill battle here.
We’d need government regulation “protecting privacy”, instead they seem all too eager to concede that in a futile effort to " protect the children ".
I doubt SearXNG is going to integrate it lmao, and if they do, someone will fork or i will keep using older versions
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
Searching is already dead. Every search results in 200 Ai articles full of bullshit, even Qwant or DuckDuckGo.
The corpo-web died already, y’all are just crying over the scraps.
You’re forgetting other countries that will just stop using American tech companies
…just wait until all your favorite search engines integrate it.
At which point they cease to be your favourites, I hope. There are so many alternatives in that space that only inertia keeps people using the Empire of Evil.
WTF? I don’t think I will use any sure that will enable this?
How does that prevent bots? Ther are massive phone farms, that can’t scan QR?
This only exists so they can link identity of your phone with your desktop computer.
Waiting for another player…
PRESS START TO JOIN
Zen is excellent.
For people who want an opinionated browser… Yes. They have sponsored shortcuts which cannot be disabled and they ghost out the option to in the settings. If you want to dig around the about:config and tweak things, fine, but I’d rather use a browser I can make my own. Librewolf is excellently bare bones.
I haven’t seen any of those things yet, but I’ll try to keep an eye out. The only one I noticed was a default search engine to Google, but DDG was an easy enough option. I like libre wolf as well, but I’m not a fan of the updating scheme on my system.
Sponsored shortcuts? They don’t have them, i did a clean install only some week ago so i doubt it’s a new thing
Never seen those, and did a fresh install recently too. And zen has a lot of customization options, it’s also so damn well designed and is great to use.
Corpo banned it for compatibility with crap code apparently
FF support is getting worse and worse though.
Barely any of the sites I use for work support FF.
Laugh all you want but shit is a bit fucked.
Ladybird is our last best hope and its barely a glimmer.
Fun fact: many sites that say that they don’t support firefox lie, their sites usually support it but they never tested it or they deem firefox “less secure” or some bullshit, but with an useragent spoofer, they will work
(Not all sites ofc)
Removed by mod
I think you should read my reply again, slowly
I’m not talking about sites that claim not to support FF. I’m talking about sites that have broken features when visited in FF.
Do you have any example? Can you send any link? I never experienced those problems myself so i want to try
Chrome is doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by not following web standards. There are several websites I have used where the payment process or uploading process only worked in chrome.
Again, this is a problem with chrome doing things that breaks consistency between browsers that are supposed to be following the same web standards.
This is very well documented, and a very common experience.
They were talking about exactly this on late night linux podcast just last week.
why would those sites support ladybird if they don’t support firefox?
That isn’t FF support. That is chrome doing the same thing as Internet Explorer did by implementing non-standard functionality to abuse their market dominance.
Sure but if devs don’t test sites in Firefox then very they don’t support Firefox.
The MV3 support in firefox is even stricter than in Chrome. I found that chrome will let you sidestep CSP to make an HTTP request. Firefox won’t.
I don’t understand what you found, but firefox still supports the web request blocking API for Mv3 extensions, which is what ublock needs.
I was debugging one of my favourite extensions this week to figure out why it didn’t work on firefox. It hadn’t been updated in years, so something changed in firefox in the last few months.
I assume the Chrome version still works. I’m not installing it.
if it hadn’t been updated in years then it will be an Mv2 extension, irrelevant to discussion of Mv3 strictness.
It was MV3. I had to rewrite the manifest as V2 to get it working.
Laughs in Firefox based browsers
Pretty fucked up considering how much malware and scammy bullshit come though ads.
Yep, sorry but not sorry. Advertisements aren’t safe. The industry has been ruined by bad actors and it’s a shame, but also not my problem.
I worked in ads only a few months and learned how fucked that industry was. They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser, sucking as much info as they can. The fact that it hasn’t been regulated to hell is shocking, and truly a failure of all leaders.
They’re basically given license to just run scripts in your browser
That’s the crazy thing.
You want to show me an image, maybe an animated gif, and link it to your website where you’re selling shit? Fine. Annoying, but fine.
But I don’t care how many crocodile tears they shed about ‘but websites depend on ad income’ – I am not letting random, unvetted advertisers run arbitrary code on my computer. I don’t care if it’s in a sandbox inside a sandbox. Exploits may be found, sandboxes may be escaped. And there’s plenty of trouble they can get into even within their little sandbox, like running a fucking crypto miner or something.
So, yeah. Adblock and noscript everywhere and always.
Yes, they can host a GIF on their server & show it to me with a non-personalized link, & promote it where they believe the average reader might be interested in it. Or some reader(s).
Just show me the ads you’re showing everybody else, and make money from sales of useful things & services.
It’s not even that hard to have targeted ads while still respecting privacy – just base the targeting on the other content on the page, rather than on the user.
Honestly, <looks at current governments> not that shocking.
Internet Browsers store way too much data and have waaaay too many permissions. It’s sickening.
not enough, what they want is personal data to mine. they cant do that in simple terms. meta, glassdoor, indeed , linkden,(plaid) tries to use convoluted mehtods to get you to give up more personal data than you normally would in order to access the rest of the site.(glassdoor and indeed has an additional reason to want you ridentiy)
It’s because people don’t go into these offices with fire and guns. If a bunch of advertising people were slaughtered every few weeks things may get better.
Same goes for collections, eventually no one will want to do the job.
The whole industry is bad actors. The quaint, pastoral idea of actually advertising things you genuinely might want to know about is utterly beyond dead, it died the moment they realized they could use the same pipeline to harvest data and manipulate and control people. Using it for mere advertising is a waste of everyone’s time and resources when they have an option so much more lucrative on the table.
It’s everyone’s problem in a way…
Over 10 years ago someone at my office had their work PC and user drive encrypted with ransomware because of a bad ad injection from one of those job search sites. Thankfully it was limited to nothing critical and incremental backups restore the drive…but hopefully they found a good lead because they were canned.
If they’d had a good ad blocker this would have been a non issue
I work in IT: Pretty much all the malware we deal with comes from ads. I’ve pitched making ad blocking standard but they never go for it, even though it’s clear it would prevent an absolute shit ton of attacks. It’s crazy!
Seriously. If Google really wants to shove ads down our throats, they could at least regulate them so they’re not constantly horny scams. But that would cost them money, oh the humanity.
Oh look all the “chrome but in a different outfit” browsers are doing the same terrible shit? What a shocker, no one could have predicted that the many many things all on the same base where actuality just fake competition.
Firefox has webserial support now. I no longer need anything chromium. Let them rot.
What is it used for?
Communicating with external devices via USB or the old D-Sub connectors.
Printers, microcontrollers, instruments, etc… Directly instead of through the OS.
Notably, ESPHome Programmer uses it for flashing ESP32s wired. Other companies like Solo Motor Controllers use it for delivering a user GUI to customers that is always updated but that can switch between versions instantly for production without having to having to deal with window’s broken method of having to manually search and download .exes for every program.
never heard of it till now. neat!
I had to use Brave earlier this year to flash firmware onto a Meshtastic device. It’s good to hear that Firefox has that option now.
Even grapheneOS use it for adb into your phone to flash the images.
webserial
they use WebUSB in GrapheneOS
Where oh where is my PWA…?
“Coming soon…”
It does? Guess I can finally yeet Chromium from my machine then.
How about bluetooth support? Has that been fixed yet?
Why the downvotes? I have 4 machines at work, and none of them can send code to a LEGO Spike Hub over bluetooth in Firefox but works perfectly fine in Chrome.
Really? Holy shit I can switch to zen fully at work and at home and uninstall chromium. Webserial was literally the only thing I needed
I heard about the web usb thing, it’s also going to be a game changer for me (I haven’t tried yet, hopefully it works)
They are all chrome with google scratched out and their name written in sharpie in its place.
Of course they are all doing it, cause they are all the same thing.
They don’t even try to pretend to fight it.
because theres no fighting google.
Microsoft tried, and google won, which is why Edge became a chrome reskin instead of what it was before.
Microsoft “tried” about as well as a quadraplegic “tries” free climbing
Everything dies.
Yeah, but the worse they are the longer they live apparently.
Luckily, that’s something you can change!
To avoid a visit by the FBI, I will say no its not.
The winning move is not to do business with them, don’t compete just exist and pretend they don’t exist. Microslop played the game and lost, but it is a stupid silly game.
kinda hard to do when google holds the internet by the balls. and can twist at any moment to get what they want.
Microsoft and Mozilla employees have both accused them of doing this in the past, to sabotage non-chrome browsers on google services, to make chrome look better and drive users to chrome.
They only ‘hold the internet by the balls’ if you are using and reliant on Google products.
There are hundreds (if not more) tutorials and lists online to guide you through degoogling
I’m sure we can get thousands of websites and every major corporation to degoogle cause you said they should.
News to me, Does google hold this site by the balls? They have a lot of power yes, but they are not some unsinkable boat.
All the FF forks are the same. Soft forks.
Pale Moon is not a soft fork.
Define soft fork
Can hold spaghetti but not a meatball 😔
ohhh, thanks!
It’s a damn shame, I’ve always liked Vivaldi otherwise. I’ve been dual running Vivaldi and Firefox for years now, Vivaldi for casual browsing and Firefox for more serious stuff + YouTube.
Oh well, it’s time to do a full switch, I guess.
Kinda funny, I’ve been doing the exact same thing with Win/Linux for approximately the same length of time. Needed Win because of dome software that just doesn’t work linux, and sadly, I still do.
Google and Microsoft can go fuck each other with a frozen cactus for all I care.
The folks at Vivaldi have been doing some work on their internal ad blocker, I think with the intention to bring most of the functionality of uBo internally so that it doesn’t have to be an extension. Not sure how far along they are, but maybe they’re intentionally keeping it quiet.
I mean, on a technical level chromium isn’t a terrible browser engine. Building your own engine from scratch is Extremely Hard™ and it’s entirely possible to build a decent browser on top of it, so I can understand why most alternative projects have done just that.
It’s just… google’s control over chromium is concerning.
Illusion of choice
Yeah its a real surprise. :)
God it still pisses me off what they did to my boy Opera. All of us left when they diverted after v12. We all saw this coming.
Then Vivaldi came which I have tried in quite a while but it sucked. Firefox it is.
Firefox and its derivatives (and Safari - sorry Apple users) are the only browsers not using Google’s Blink web engine these days - at least until Ladybird is released.
Despite the Mozilla Foundation’s many stupid decisions, Firefox (and Safari) is starting to look like the only thing stopping Google from completely controlling the internet.
People will *anything *except use FireFox
The browser wars have been kind of strange from the perspective of someone who’s been using Firefox for well over a decade. It’s a bit like hearing about the Civil War while living in Oregon.
Librewolf gang rise up
Remember that article awhile back about the FBI recommending you use an adblocker?
That means even the FBI recommends you don’t use Google and Microsoft browsers anymore
The 2026 FBI recommends that you vote for Trump, or else.
The more you tighten your grip, Google, the more ad revenue will slip through your fingers.
They could have sat on 30 second ads every 15 minutes till the cows came home and most of us would have been fine with it.
They could have sat on premium family for $9 a month for years and we’d have been ok with it.
They had to be greedy as fuck until none of us want to use their services.
The line has to go up. That is literally the law. The fact that Youtube has a larger income than Disney doesn’t mean it will stop. They can never stop. They just can crash and burn down eventually but only after making a few people very very rich.
That’s the damn thing, the line could have gone up through getting more people. They decided less people and higher prices would win… it will not
Doesn’t chrome have like a 90% market share? I doubt they can get many more people, therefore need to get more out of the ones they have
speaking more to youtube, a bunch of the other alphabet properties.
Not after they demonstrate the power of their evil browser. In a way, you have determined the choice of the ads that you will be shown first.
Honestly I don’t think so, the average person won’t bother with changing browser. So they might lose more users but they dont care about those users because they are were using adblock anyways
Excellent reason for even the normies to ditch chrome 🥂
Just use Firefox (or Zen Browser, which is a nice fork of Firefox)
Cue the Brave shills “recommending” to switch to Brave in 5…4…3…
Wait what’s wrong with Brave?
Brave is by a company who’s in the business of serving ads.
Much like google was back in the day, they’re trying to obtain market share with a product that they can easily manipulate after the fact and rely on people not jumping ship as things get progressively worse and worse bit by bit
Think of the “approved ads” era followed by the “enhanced security features” which made it so your block list couldn’t be updated at a moments notice and now it’s being stripped entirely.
Better to avoid it entirely and just use Firefox or a derivative thereof
It’s not firefox
Firefox doesn’t have tab groups on mobile
“Firefox doesn’t have this one feature I like so I will keep using browser made by an ad company. I’m sure there will be no consequences long term”.
Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin
“Oh shit. No one could have predicted this!”.
Firefox dragged its feet on an extremely useful feature for years.
Are you seriously trying to act like Firefox hasn’t been continually shooting themselves in the foot the past decade?
I’ve been using Firefox for decades without issues. Yes, Chrome was a better browser for a long time but Firefox wasn’t that far behind and was absolutely fine browser to use.
Do you really think Mozilla could win browser race with Google, the fucking second biggest company in the world? Of course Chrome had more features, it had basically unlimited resources at it disposal. But yeah, let’s blame Mozilla for not winning with them decisively.
YOU are shooting yourself in the foot. You abandoned Firefox for couple of features and soon you will be browsing the web with ads. Come back and tell me how extremely useful Chrome’s features are when can you no longer skip Youtube ads.
You may have a browsing addiction if you need tab groups on mobile, wow…
I swear I hate tabbed browsing, because it leads to people hording tabs like a freaking squirrel hordes nuts.
If you need it for later, book mark it.
If you’re done with it close it.
This doesn’t work when I have memory issues. That tab is open as part of my external system of memory for myself so I know what I was trying to do before one of my several issues prevented me finishing.
Those are my emotional support ‘∞ tabs’, thank-you very much.
I might need them.
Bookmarks in mobile Firefox is another issue. Bookmark management is a massive chore. I end up keeping tabs around a lot longer in mobile just to avoid messing with it.
On desktop Firefox with the Bookmark Tab Here extension (native functionality I missed from Chrome), bookmarking and organizing a new page is just two clicks. I use that workflow extensively. Apparently I have over 7000 bookmarks all organized that way.
7000 bookmarks
… Whoa… of what, out of morbid curiosity?
I’ve started using Karakeep for this. If I haven’t used a tab in a while but want it to stick around, throw it to Karakeep, let ai tag it, then close that tab.
“People don’t use their browsers how I want REEEE!!!”
Added to nightly somewhat recently.
It’s still not pushed out to phones. I’m going to keep shit talking them until it’s actually out, because they’ve spent far too much time stringing them along
It is also chromium based, so stands to get the same nerf.
Yeap, just a matter of time.
Nope, Shields are built into the browser itself, not as an extension which uses those APIs. [1]
I would argue that if you’re choosing between chrome and brave, brave is still better.
Sure. Probably. But why are we choosing between Chrome and Brave?
People entirely blind to the idea that they can just choose something else instead of 2 piles of shit, one of which has a cherry on top and was sprayed with perfume recently.
Its like some sort of awful american tradition at this point.
Is a two party system not capable of approptiately responding to the needs of the people within it?
For a lot of people, it’s an easy transition.
DDG, Vivaldi, etc. harder transitions.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
I’m just saying perfect is the enemy of good.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
Very difficult to believe. I have had issues with Firefox over the years but in every single instance it was a result of my custom setup. The browser has no major compatibility issues out of the box. I think it’s way more likely your parents are technologically illiterate and confuse other problems or gaps in their knowledge as issues with the “new” thing (in this case, the browser).
I rarely encounter sites that don’t work with Firefox. I’d be surprised if it’s even 1 per month.
When that happens, then I just end up opening it in a different browser. I can’t actually remember the last time I’ve needed to do so.
Firefox for my parents would result in calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right.
Sorry, what? If they are so tech-illiterate that they have to call you and ask why the website is not working, then what kind of web sites are they visiting?
Been using FF since 2022 and the only sites that wont work are the ones that utilizes HID. Are your parents trying to flash custom firmware for their phones though browser every third day?
Good for you. I’ve been in tech for over 16 years and FF absolutely does not work well on ~25% of websites.
Been in tech longer then that (if for some reason we are doing that now) and I will officially call bullshit on that claim.
I get it that tech people stumble upon these sites much more often than non-techies. My point was that if your parents are having website issues every other day (which implies they are not tech-savvy), then why would they even visit sites that are not FF-compatible. How many sites out of all the web do you think are not compatible with FF? Give an example of a normie site that wont work well with FF.
On the other hand, if your parents are tech-savvy then why would they ask you why a website wont load properly? Do you get it that your statement counters itself?
Wanna link those websites so we can see?
Wait, really? The access cripplers are crazily powerful add-ons for the paranoid, like NoScript, not the browser itself. Like what example websites, specifically?
calls every 3 days for sites that aren’t working right
Sir, 2000s called and asked you to return this argument back.
It’s true, unfortunately. Not every 3 days, but once a month I encount these sites.
Change the icon on the desktop to the chrome pinwheel and they’ll never know the difference.
After seeing all the people talking about Vivaldi in this thread I figured I’d try it out…got to the “Panel” setup page, saw there’s one for reddit, maybe I’ll try adding lemmy.zip…
Failed Cloudflare check in panel, but it worked in a tab…okay, weird.
Thought about checking out Kagi since now privacy is on my mind…the front page would reload every 5 seconds so I couldn’t read about it. It’d say “Verification failed please try again” and refresh.
Apparently this has been an issue with Vivaldi for some time? I guess this is the future of the web? You try to escape the claws of these giant internet powerhouses and they just…don’t let you?
What sites are those?
Websites that are actively malicious against firefox, that miraculously work when you have a useragent plugin that makes firefox report that its chrome proving that the site works fine, if the asshole code is removed?
I think this is when @AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com will discreetly not answer or otherwise avoid mentioning the exact websites… (Because there are none)
Yup mostly because I don’t care anymore. You’re all stating the, “it works on my machine” mantra and I don’t care. See my other comments for some examples.
On iOS you can go on pornhub on brave and it blocks all the ads and cookie popups.
That’s one reason that uh… “someone” might use brave.
Orion also blocks ads on iOS and isn’t backed by Thiel, run by Eich or an ad business startup masquerading as an ad blocking browser.
Ok i will look
Because Firefox is a different engine and might not work well with certain websites.
I’ve only ever encountered one website where Firefox didnt work.
and that was because the website was coded maliciously to reject firefox… a plugin to make it think firefox was chrome and suddenly it ran fine.
Couldn’t use just set the user agent?
Well I did, the Amazon Prime Video has many weird behaviors on Firefox compared to the Chromium engine, even YouTube used to have before.
Any web developer knows it isn’t as simple as “code once, work everywhere”. If companies don’t test on Firefox (which is a reality nowadays given its small market share) bugs happen in very weird and unusual ways.
Only issue I’ve ever had with Amazon Video was the fact they artificially limit resolution to 320p for people on linux, regardless of browser.
Firefox doesn’t support WebHID, so I can forget about configuring my custom keyboard with anything other than a Chromium based browser.
Keyboard setup would be a system level setting, no?
I consider that a website problem, not a me problem. I choose what I do on the internet, the internet doesn’t dictate the software I use.
My real issue is as a dev of a web application, using Firefox makes things occasionally render differently. It’s only once in a blue moon but enough to make me just accept using Vivaldi to be closer to the defacto user experience. And then I can’t be bothered to switch between FF (I use Zen) and Vivaldi and split my bookmarks, extensions, logins etc. it just doesn’t make sense.
Brave has a certain distasteful reputation earned by repeated unethical fuckery. If you are fine with what brave does, you have no reason to avoid chrome in the first place.
So Brave is a good answer to an absolutely terrible question?
Nothing.
