Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44538517

by ipsum2 • 1 year ago

171 155 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

The latest version of Chrome (138) removes Manifest v2 and all extensions that rely on it.

p_ing4• 1 year ago

uBlock Origin Lite is still there

mattl• 1 year ago

Firefox is still there, but Mozilla is adding AI slop to it too. I’d love to see an extension to disable all that stuff, or ideally get rid of it and make it an extension

compootr• 1 year ago

Zen browser is pretty minimal in terms of bloat carried from FF

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303974

ziofill• 1 year ago

How come Zen looks a lot like Arc? https://arc.net/

jksflkjl3jk3• 1 year ago

Just use LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on Android.

They basically strip out all the anti-privacy, anti-user "features" from Firefox.

dotcoma3• 1 year ago

You can use Librewolf, or the Firefox-based browser from Swedish VPN company Mullvad.

DaSHacka• 1 year ago

+1 for Librewolf, but this is the first time I've heard about Ironfox.

https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox

dossy• 1 year ago

There's still a way to load it under Chrome 138, but when Chrome 139 lands, that's when MV2 will finally be removed.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule

krackers• 1 year ago

In current chromium source, it seems still possible to force manifest v2 extensions with `kAllowLegacyMV2Extensions` feature flag?

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

This however is a good time to export any extension preferences, because once it's removed you won't be able to access them.

ranger_danger3• 1 year ago

I think uBO Lite works just fine for 99% of users.

angrydev• 1 year ago

Yeah, I switched a while ago and it’s has 0 impact on my browsing.

adithyassekhar• 1 year ago

Same. I didn't even enable complete blocking just default one. I'm not too concerned about invisible trackers, I use meta products daily. Just the visible ads.

mparramon2• 1 year ago

It’s the principle. When they’ve shown they’ll jank one extension because it doesn’t align with their business model, they’ve shown they’ll jank any extension in the future as they see fit.

I’m voting with my feet.

TiredOfLife• 1 year ago

They didn't yank an extension.

Beijinger• 1 year ago

Social Fixer is gone too. What to do?

aembleton• 1 year ago

Install Firefox and add Social Fixer on there.

Jiahang• 1 year ago

so i use adguard in chrome now

ruslan_sure2• 1 year ago

adguard is a way to go. their app kills these ads perfectly

oktoberpaard• 1 year ago

You might as well use uBlock Origin Lite. The point is that all of these options are less powerful because of the limitations of manifest v3. Instead of downgrading the effectiveness, they’ve opted to release a separate less powerful option so that it’s clear to the end user that it’s less effective than what was available with manifest v2.

xanth• 1 year ago

Is edge also following suit?

p_ing4• 1 year ago

In the past Microsoft said they would. It would be a large engineering effort to preserve Manifestv2

rasz3• 1 year ago

For microsoft its a joke to support. We are talking about _one hook_ into Chrome internals for declarativeNetRequest to work.

bigbuppo2• 1 year ago

Advertising company forcibly disables software that stops the spread of malware.

Why would they do that?

j453• 1 year ago

Users clicks feed the creation of value

bigbuppo2• 1 year ago

BRB, training an AI to find the optimal cat photos to promote to maximize ARPU.

const_cast3• 1 year ago

The plausible deniability reason is that Manifest V2 gave way too much power to extensions, which is true.

... except that we already execute remote JavaScript on our browsers constantly. And we do it, usually, unconsentually. Versus extensions, which are a deliberate thing you need to install.

xtracto• 1 year ago

That's what i find stupid of current browsers. When Firefox was first created by "stripping" all the bloat from Netscape navigator, the idea was that Extensions would allow end users to add optional functionality . It put the user in control of their browser experience.

There should be a browser that doesn't assume their users are stupid. I want to turn off CORS I want to be able to modify the DOM and inject whatever the heck I want.

gargron• 1 year ago

Firefox is still a great browser with probably the best devtools.

rrgok• 1 year ago

Can you expand on the "best devtools" comparing to Chrome's?

ews• 1 year ago

Moved to firefox and I am glad I did, I want to use a browser that respects my privacy choices

tombert4• 1 year ago

I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked.

I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.

nar001• 1 year ago

That doesn't solve the issue of ManifestV2 being removed though, Brave will have it removed at the same time as Chrome, when it's pulled from the code base

zulban• 1 year ago

Every browser has occasional big issues. If you haven't seen one yet in (insert browser name here) then you just haven't been around long enough.

j453• 1 year ago

Would it be possible to just look at the videos in a different browser?

EasyMark4• 1 year ago

This is a good reason to stick with LTS vesions of firefox

hardwaresofton• 1 year ago

This is the right answer, and more people (especially technical people like frequent HN) should be pointing this out.

"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.

Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.

It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.

xaerise• 1 year ago

Sadly more than just ads. my ublock/pihole rules is mostly tracking ( +80% ) and very little ad rules.

Madmallard• 1 year ago

Apparently no one remembers when Firefox changed their terms of service literally this year to become adversarial toward their own users.

Librewolf is the way to go now.

ranger_danger3• 1 year ago

No thanks. Their own devs have gladly called the project "very woke", and a "certainly quite political project".

DavideNL4• 1 year ago

The binaries aren't signed… :’(

Also, it seems quite vague to me exactly who/what company/entity is behind it.

ranger_danger3• 1 year ago

It crashes every few days for me and has since the last several major releases... enough that I can't rely on it anymore. (UG) Chromium has never crashed on me once.

paulryanrogers2• 1 year ago

Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration? I've heard some graphics drivers can be crashy when apps push the boundaries.

I have had crashes with Firefox in a long time.

b0ner_t0ner• 1 year ago

Highly recommend Zen Browser: https://github.com/zen-browser

qmmmur• 1 year ago

What do you like about it?

DavideNL4• 1 year ago

…yet another Chromium browser though - supporting the Google browser monopoly.

dlcarrier• 1 year ago

Go with Pale Moon, if you want a privacy-respecting fork of Firefox.

EasyMark4• 1 year ago

I like librewolf, but it has made similar choices as a fork

M95D2• 1 year ago

But Firefox is so dependent on google (money, code) that it's absolutely impossible they won't also remove manifest v2. It will just take a little while, for appearances...

slumberlust• 1 year ago

It seems disingenuous to penalize a company for something that hasn't happened and is based on an assumption of interest.

In the same way we should chastise the platforms that choose to enshitify, we should praise those that hold out.

93po• 1 year ago

About a year ago FF said they had no current plans to remove V2 support, and if they did, they'd give at least 12 month notice. Which to me is basically language saying they absolutely will remove it at some point, otherwise they'd just say "no we'll never remove it, fuck google".

I've moved to LibreWolf personally

citizenpaul• 1 year ago

Errrr....https://winaero.com/mozilla-has-removed-the-do-not-sell-user...

rovr1384• 1 year ago

Did you look at the FAQ page they created afterwards?

'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

I wish Firefox would at least implement a basic adblocker on iOS.

Without it, browsing is unbearable. I wonder if they're not allowed to do so because of their contract with Google?

comprev• 1 year ago

NextDNS [0] has proven very useful for me on iOS. Firefox is 99% ad-free. Only for YouTube do I switch to Brave Browser.

I use Firefox on other devices and use the sync functionality so prefer to use it where possible.

My home router (Draytek) is also configured to force any connected devices to use NextDNS too.

Definitely worth the €20 annual subscription.

[0] https://nextdns.io

cassianoleal• 1 year ago

Firefox Focus can be used as an ad-blocker.

DavideNL4• 1 year ago

I agree; i use Firefox on all my Desktop devices. But on iOS it’s the worst. I never use it, except to quickly check for a (synced) bookmark.

ProtoAES256• 1 year ago

IIRC Firefox on iOS is basically a wrapper around Safari since it's not "opened up"?

Springtime• 1 year ago

Among the neater features of the full-featured uBO is its ability to load userscripts from external sources.

While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.

notgrimm• 1 year ago

I fucking love how they are not just deleting it from my addons, but FORCING ME TO DELETE. They just dropped pop up "uhm.... it's unsafe, so... WE RECOMEND TO DELETE IT", and then won't let me to turn it on again.

KevinMS2• 1 year ago

HN was so hyped when chrome came out. Pushing it hard. A few people were saying, um guys, chrome is made by a company that sells ads, this is not going to work out well.

loktarogar• 1 year ago

It's been a good 16 years, though.

KevinMS2• 1 year ago

that was part of the plan

mkozlows2• 1 year ago

Children who were born when Chrome came out can vote in the midterms next year. If your prediction takes as long to mature as a newborn baby, it's maybe _too_ prescient.

wting• 1 year ago

Chrome launched in an era where IE didn't stop the gazillion pop ups and crashed pretty often losing dozens of windows, before tabbed browsing and with no restore. Firefox was a resource hog due to memory fragmentation.

Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.

queenkjuul5• 1 year ago

Everyone was hyped when Chrome came out. This is hard to believe but the world was different 20 years ago

whoisyc• 1 year ago

I remember Firefox crashing on me nearly daily around the time Chrome came out. I didn’t need anyone to push Chrome on me. Chrome was just simply technologically superior.

But of course today there is little reason to not use Firefox.

franczesko• 1 year ago

Brave?

howdyhowdy• 1 year ago

Ladybird ladybird

charcircuit2• 1 year ago

Ladybird doesn't support ublock origin either, nor does it even allow for ad blockers extentions like Chrome still does.

al_borland• 1 year ago

I’m excited to see what Ladybird becomes, but it’s not exactly ready to be a daily driver.

chis• 1 year ago

Has anyone made the switch to firefox? I’d be sad to lose my nice google profile integration to chrome and the password manager. And whenever I try Firefox it feels a little bit jankier and slower, but that might just be in my head

mkozlows2• 1 year ago

You will lose the password manager, but switch to 1Password -- it's way better anyway. Also, if you use Android, Firefox Mobile, with ad-blocking there, is the real killer advantage of Firefox.

Sammi2• 1 year ago

No, switch to something open source like bitwarden or you'll just end up locked into a bad situation again.

trelliscoded• 1 year ago

Yes. Firefox has its own password manager and profile system. Once I copied the chrome settings to firefox, I closed chrome and rarely open it these days.

cagey• 1 year ago

Ditto. I installed CrunchBang++ Linux[1] on a couple of out-of-support 4GB-RAM Chromebooks about 6 months ago, and they (with Firefox (w/shared account) and uBlock Origin) basically continue to fill the Chromebook role (my morning before-work lazy web-surfing guided by Inoreader) with aplomb: occasionally I go a little too tab-crazy (or open one too many YouTube tabs) and it freezes, but simply restarting (holding the power button down until it reboots) gets me going again. I save+close excess tabs to OneTab and life goes on. Extremely utilitarian.

[1] https://www.crunchbangplusplus.org/

mparramon2• 1 year ago

I did, a few months ago when they disabled uBlock on my Chrome.

The experience has been a delight. It runs smoothly, I can customize it more than Chrome (compact mode being one example [1]), and with the official iCloud Passwords extension I get to use the same password manager I use on my iPhone.

I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Best part being, if I need something that Chrome provides and Firefox doesn’t, I can potentially implement it myself, and contribute to a proper open source project while I’m at it.

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...

tlavoie• 1 year ago

Sure, years ago, and it's been great. I do keep Vivaldi around as a Chrome-variant for those sites that need it, and appreciate their general approach. However, Firefox has the things I need, e.g.:

- Various integrations, such as password managers. - uBlock Origin - Temporary containers - so even those sites that save cookies, are really saving them ephemerally until that container closes.

const_cast3• 1 year ago

You can export your passwords from chrome as a CSV and then import them into Firefox's password manager. Although, best would be using an external password manager that always keeps your passwords encrypted, like bitwarden. Remember to delete the file (shred even) and reboot so your passwords aren't hanging around in disk/memory. Same goes for bookmarks, although those are less sensitive.

Sammi2• 1 year ago

Switching from chrome password manager to bitwarden is as easy as clicking export and then import.

Teslazar• 1 year ago

I gave Firefox a try for a month, but ran into enough issues that I ended up switching back to Chrome about a week ago. Here are some of the problems I encountered that I can recall at the moment and doesn't include the many issues I managed to fix:

Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.

Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.

The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.

Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.

Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.

solardev• 1 year ago

I've used Firefox for a few months now and it's generally fine, but noticeably slow and janky compared to Chrome. Several websites just didn't work right and required Chrome. The dev tools seem unreliable, with the network tab often failing to capture requests correctly.

I miss Chrome but won't go back without UBlock.

Hoping Kagi's Orion browser gets better.

queenkjuul5• 1 year ago

It's a little bit slower, but I've been using Firefox on all my personal machines for ten years and finally switched my work web dev machine when Firefox introduced tab groups recently.

It's fine. My issues with it are few and far between. It's a little worse on android but small price to pay for ublock and dark reader imo

ruslan_sure2• 1 year ago

Google. The Advertising Company.

eviks• 1 year ago

And unfortunately not a single great alternative as the better chromium forks don't plan to support it either...

thatsnotmepls• 1 year ago

Strange, still enabled and working for me.

Chrome 138.0.7204.101 uBlock Origin 1.65.0

queenkjuul5• 1 year ago

It dies in 139

roshin• 1 year ago

I tried to move to brave, but I'm really disappointed in it. It frequently crashes, and it's slow to create new tabs/windows. The only reason I stick to it is due to the browser having ad block built in

5555624• 1 year ago

What OS? I use it under Windows 10 and it's never crashed or been slow. I';ve never had more than six tabs open, though.

kyleee• 1 year ago

Yeah this report is a bit hard to believe, I have hundreds of tabs open in brave constantly and they have a native tab suspend/hibernate that works great for tabs you haven’t accessed in a while. And my favorite small feature ‘force paste’ for all those inputs with janky paste blocking “security” features

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

Seems everyone is releasing a browser nowadays. (Not literally, this is a figure of speech.)

Perhaps uBlock/uMatrix needs its own browser.

Mozilla is "all in" on surveillance advertising. From its press releases and strategic initiatives (for lack of a better term), it appears to believe online advertising is essential for the www to exist. Whereas, it has never stated that "ad blockers" are essential for the www to exist.

EasyMark4• 1 year ago

Yeah but it's always a fork of firefox or chrome. I have seen nothing to indicate they are not all in on surveillance advertising. They are looking into "anonymous group advertising" by interest, now can someday reverse engineer that and figure out that you like boutique spicy pickles? maybe? I have my doubts.

creamyhorror• 1 year ago

Try Waterfox (if not Firefox), and UBlock Origin Lite if staying on Chrome.

tiberius_p• 1 year ago

Librewolf works fine for me. Comes with uBlock Origin installed.

RandyOrion• 1 year ago

Not to defend chrome or chromium, there is a way for chrome users to use manifest v2 in version 138 and above. See the link below.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...

For me, I choose not to manually update my ungoogled chromium to version 138 and above.

28304283409234• 1 year ago

I moved to, and pay for, Vivaldi. I want to be the customer.

philonoist• 1 year ago

what service by Vivaldi did you pay for?

spwa4• 1 year ago

No worries! We'd only ever be discussing this if governments hadn't provided a way to access their services, most of which are only available on the internet.

Can you imagine just how stupid it would be for governments not to provide another software for accessing it? If they didn't provide something, internet giants would be able to dictate their only means to communicate with citizens. Influence elections. Even lock out governments from their own countries. How moronic would a government need to be to risk that happening? Plus it would be unrealistically cruel as well, because it would of course deny access to the poor.

So no worries. Governments care about people. That's what they keep saying. So they have surely prevented something like this from happening, or provide an alternative.

Right?

zerr• 1 year ago

This means Chrome is finally dead among most of the tech-savvy users.

alienbaby• 1 year ago

yup, switched to firefox this morning

niuzeta• 1 year ago

Made a switch to FF/Brave. I did try to embrace ads for a bit but that attempt expired within minutes.

tim333• 1 year ago

It also seems to muck up bypass-paywalls and my clearly reader extension. I wonder how long I can stay on the current version?

gloosx2• 1 year ago

so why not staying at 137? what are we missing?

l11r• 1 year ago

Security patches and new features that sites will inevitably adopt in the future?

gloosx2• 1 year ago

So you say, after almost 20 years of development by thousands of engineers and developers and 130 versions it is still not secure and needs new features? That is kinda weird.

puppycodes• 1 year ago

has uBlock considered making a browser?

Just curious.

throwaway3283• 1 year ago

Nyxt Browser is about to bounce back hard (with Allah's blessing), after a major rewrite to use Electron. I wonder what this means for them...

zparky• 1 year ago

I need to dedicate some time to learning nyxt, it seems really enjoyable to use.

throwaway3283• 1 year ago

The pre-release AppImages that John Mercouris is working hard on are getting verrry solid, if you get an hour I recommend a play around :)

https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt/releases

WaltPurvis• 1 year ago

FWIW, these instructions allow you to re-enable uBlock in Chrome 138. A temporary fix, but I needed a temporary fix so I could export my hundreds of custom filters (so I can load them into uBlock in Firefox).

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1itw1bz/end_o...

Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone

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