Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. They didn't do that and probably never will.

If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.

We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.

I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.

But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.

I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it.

Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.

Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support.

Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.

The solution is to use Firefox. uBlock Origin always worked best in Firefox anyway:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

I'm fairly happy with uBlock Origin Lite. Sure the original was better but this one does the job as well. uBlock Origin Lite is a MV3 extension, by the same author.

One Google doom over, another to go: https://keepandroidopen.org/

There's never been a better time to switch to Firefox. Hopefully soon we'll have another player in this space with Ladybird but for now, Firefox is almost necessary to use the internet unimpeded.

There are also some good Firefox forks out there, and I have been daily driving Zen for nearly a year. However, Librewolf and Floorp are both good options if you don't like Firefox's defaults or their push for more AI features (which you can turn off, to be fair).

I’m irrationally angry with Mozilla for the way they’ve handled Firefox over the past few years. Clearly we need an independent, safe browser and there are no major alternatives for the common folk. Just let me pay a monthly fee to keep Firefox lean and fast instead of jamming AI tools and 3rd party integrations.

Switch to firefox

There is a very easy solution to this problem, it's called FireFox. Now if only Mozilla would stop messing with it and instead would turn it into a class example of speed and memory efficiency I'd be even happier. But it's pretty good and I'm running it routinely with way too many tabs open (in the 100's, on a 32G laptop). I do have to be careful about unloading stuff. So, kick the Chrome habit.

I'm hoping that Mozilla Firefox can adopt a similar foundation/donation strategy as Signal has proven to work quite well.

We really need independence from Google in the browser landscape if we want the open web to survive.

Google for me died when they banned my many years old gmail account out of blue. Because i used vpn to access it.

It was such a big hit to my online life to lose my email like that.

Their appeal system is fully automated, impossible to get a human to look at your case.

This is warning to any reader of this comment, do not depend on your google account to be forever.

Ironically, this is a fantastic time to use Firefox with UBO. I made the switch back when Chrome first threatened to block UBO and it was clear they were just kicking the can. What I've come to find is most of the things with ads won't take the time to 'block' UBO on Firefox. Perhaps it is not a big enough segment to justify anti adblocking coding. Youtube seems to have given up trying to fight it. Most things just work. It has been a long time since I've needed to fire up Chrome for anything.

The reality is that Chrome users still have sufficient ad blocking so as to not be impacted by this. What will be interesting is if it stops being sufficient, at which point I think people will migrate. But until then, why would they? Most people don't really care if their extension is MV2 or MV3, they just want their youtube video to play faster.

I'm pretty sure it is just a matter of time before the first (open source?) extensions marketplace for Chromium fork extensions will hit the net.

A party like Helium or Brave might even already be working on it. Because while Google might not like it at all, a huge chunk of people love extensions like uBO and ease of use a little bit too much.

I've been using the Brave browser for years. I just turned off all the crypto stuff. How does Firefox today compare with Brave today?

The trouble with adblocking is that it causes discomfort to a powerful party without making any demands. We withhold attention at scale, but we never say what we'd accept in exchange for giving it back. The only thing the advertisers can do is escalate, and they own most of the spaces we operate in.

There probably is a bargain - however faustian - to be struck. Advertising optimises for money transferred immediately over long term positive-sum introductions. It's obvious why they do that, but adblocking could be the leverage needed to encourage something more long-term beneficial for all.

What I can't work out is who the counterparty even is. My own hope is that Google and Meta face a 'kodak moment' - with genuinely better advertising simply overtaking their business. What I'm unsure about is how advertising's equivalent of the digital camera finds buyers - plenty of us want to walk away from advertising, and it's possible to adopt something less mutually destructive as a user... but the free stuff advertising currently pays for is not so easily replaced. Anyone have an idea what disruption would even look like in that space?

Haven't used chrome in years, Firefox has served me well

I can imagine business reviews within Google that are seeing precipitous drops in Ad revenue given the uptake of AI Mode, which needs to be balanced out. And this becomes an easy tap that they can open, in the pretext of 'security', so Ad Words campaigns weren't getting rendered previously start showing up. If they'd only look at cracking down on malicious Ads rendered through their systems, it would be applause worthy, but I guess we're asking too much.

This summer when visiting father I noticed he is using Firefox with uBO as his default browser on desktop, it made much easier to switch from Chrome to Firefox also on his phone since there was not Google sync across browsers argument present, but I can imagine this can make switching for people invested too much into Google account troublesome, since 3rd party Chromium browsers don't support Google Sync, neither does Firefox, though they could just switch to Firefox on both and use Firefox Sync.

Personally I am fine with having desktop (Vivaldi) and phone (Firefox) completely separated without sync (not using Google account in any of them, using only dummy account in Android TV for Smarttube and play store (I'd like to thank Google for disabling X-plore file manager, which is not possible to reenable, but anyway I switched to Cx file explorer which lets me to connect over FTP, which is all I need to manage ATV)), it's just not that easy to sync passwords, bookmarks and other settings when switching to other phone once in a few years.

When I was younger I would do computer repair and maintenance for friends and family. The deal was I didn't charge them and they let me set the computer up to be more secure and useful. Back in the XP days I used a Winsock32 Fix to replace a section of the registry to remove malware before installing an antivirus I chose. Regardless of what else I did, I would install Mozilla (later Firefox) and change the icon in Windows to be that of Internet Explorer. Later, with newer versions of Windows, I would change the icon to open Chrome. Eventually, everyone switched to using Chrome and I stopped having to do this. Strange how I now need to change the Chrome icon to open Firefox or Brave if I keep volunteering my time. No way will I use Chrome out of the box nor will I let others use it if they want my help.

Waterfox is the best browser I have ever used. Native tree style tabs, minimalist UI, built in ad blocking, Firefox extensions.

Allowing Google to capture both phones (android) and browsers (chrome) was a mistake. Needs to be broken up...

All that hassle to sell youtube premium

I don't understand why anyone uses Chromium browsers other than being part of the herd.

Firefox-based browsers are the last bastion of safe web browsing. Even vanilla Firefox is starting to falter, but it's still worlds better than ANY Chromium based nonsense.

I know people don't like apple and safari here, but I like safari. It works good enough for me. And when an experience is off, it helps me develop my web developer hat by better understanding webkit and why safari has a different experience or frontend like behavior.

I'm more of a firefox person, but does this impact other chromium based browsers that have retained MV2? Eg, is there another repo for extensions beyond the chrome web store?

I'm wondering because my wife has a subscription to speechify (commercial text to speech app), and uses it to listen to online textbooks. It has recently pretty much stopped working properly (auto-reads headers, but not the main text of the book). I thought it might be due to MV3 and the extension no longer being able to parse the page properly.

I was about to try the chrome variants that haven't gone to MV2, but I guess this removal of MV2 exensions would mean that all MV2 browsers are now crippled..

ungoogled-chromium (https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-por...) still supports MV3/uBO and is de-Googled.

However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01000

I made a conscious attempt to try to switch to Zen (built on Gecko/Firefox), but ended up switching back to Chromium-based browsers because pages just feel like they load faster with Chromium. :(

15 years ago: "why is google putting so much effort into building a web browser? it must be because they want to see the web grow and by extension more people will use their services"

Been using FF since they announced this. The only disadvantage I've found is that I think it consumes more memory compared against chromium based browsers.

Hoping my browser gets some love in the near future

For most people, mv3 is "good enough". But that's mostly just random chance. If sites really start taking advantage of the deficiencies in mv3 to push ads, I think Chrome will lose a lot of users. And I think at that point Google will be forced to backtrack and bring back mv2. (Quite contrary to people who think this is just the start of the slippery slope, boiling the frog move to manifest vEvil which will disable adblocking entirely).

I think the new features in MV3 are great, and UBO lite is great. The initial versions of UBOl worked, but definitely lost some power user features. Those are basically all back, it now has full scriptlet support, custom dynamic filters work, element zapper is back and you can now have custom dnr rules. That's a very powerful feature that doesn't exist in UBO.

The big loss for me with the mv2 deprecation was uMatrix, so I made my own replacement. It's a prototype, but you can try it if you like: https://github.com/taviso/matrix3

I think the real question is how have Edge and Mozilla shipped WebExtension support on Android, but Google hasn't. If other competent vendors can ship it then there can't be a technical reason, it must be a policy decision. I'm more open to hearing conspiracy theories about that than MV3 :)

How about Brave? Any thoughts?

Contrary to some confusion about whether firefox will keep mv2:

Yes they will. Also I predict that MV2 is going to be a major boon for firefox.

It has taken a long time to prove the value of firefox to the masses and I believe mv2 extensions in particular ublock origin will be what keeps people coming back to it

I've not touched chrome in decades. Firefox stands strong. I would donate but in EU that comes with tax issues.

The media just have to report the removal of ad blocking as a security/safety issue.

If users are made aware that what Chromium is doing, they can make a better decision, but it has to be called out in every post about Chromium (preferably mentioning a few safer choices), otherwise it will disappear in the noise.

Funny how many people shit on Firefox in this thread. To some of us it was ALWAYS OBVIOUS this was going to happen. Google is an advertisement company, after all. “Chrome is better still except for the shit we’re getting rammed down our throats”

Firefox <3 open web <3 corporate demons </3

What Google means to say is that MV3 will allow them to more closely control what you’re able to do with your time, since this was done primarily to target ad blocking software.

Not that this matters much anymore as Google is now more an AI than it is a search engine, and an unreliable one at that.

Weirdly enough, you can install the full version of uBO on Edge, and I think it's a great option for less tech savvy family and friends. It's basically chrome but without the 'make this your default browser' shenanigans.

Thank you google for hosting the downloader that exists for making it easy to use for automated testing('cause all the other people still use it). Its the only use case that exists for me(actually my ai) to use it.

This caused me to go back and try Firefox again, I struggled with performance years ago on Mac when I did this. This time it’s been great, I switched from Arc to Zen and don’t see any reason to go back.

When you make your money selling ads, you're not going to want your users to block ads. It's as simple as that. Google should not be allowed to both sell web ads and control a browser platform.

The real issue is one fine day all web devs will gangup and say

- This site works only with Chrome or Edge.

I sincerely hope worldwide software devs grow up some ethics and resist doing such things.

Brave still lets you enable MV2 Extensions in its settings despite being built on chromium and its adb-locker does not rely on the extension system afaik.

Pick my mother-in-law phone, is full of apps that pushes mensages every second, ad block is a way to prevent web to become IE with that toolbars, remember?

I stopped using chromium browsers years ago. After this move, not sure why anyone would.

If I can’t install an ad/malware blocker, I’m not using your browser.

Apparently uBO can't be ported to MV3, as dynamic request interception is no longer allowed, only fixed block lists.

"For security and privacy"

Actual title is "Google Has Removed Manifest V2 Extensions From the Chrome Web Store, Including uBlock Origin"

Google's Evil knows no more boundaries.

Hopefully more and more people wake up as to what this adMonster has become.

If we want a real open world wide in the future, we need to do something about Google. UBO is not the only one killed by Google here. They will continue on their wicked path. (And, while it may be great that Ladybird exists, I have some doubts that this will really be a contender. We should not become lazy and think that Google will just comply with the demands of The People here - its business is based on controlling influx of adMoney via its Evil Empire, and it secures this by de-facto controlling the browser stack. Just look how many people in % use the chrome-codebase now. That IS effectively a monopoly powered by greed.)

As a longtime Firefox user: shrug

I don't get it why don't they include it in a separate fork in Chromium..... problem solved.

This entire thread is so ridiculous. UBlock Origin Lite still blocks all the ads.

The same day I finally migrated from Arc to Zen. What a coincidence ^^

I suspect it's to force even more people to use they AI

Google has been boiling the frog for a long time with this one. I for one will keep using Firefox.

People fall for "think of the children!" so let's also try "think of the elderly!". We're a society that ruthlessly opposes individual responsibility and individual outcomes.

Firefox is still great!

uBlock Origin Lite

"No way to prevent this" say users of only browser where this regularly happens.

Seems to be an unpopular opinion, but uBlock Origin Lite has been fine so far.

Next front in the ad-blocking war will be AI-based instead of simple heuristics anyway.

Switched the family to Firefox. I use Libre but I understand it’s a hard sell. FF is much easier and the regular user can’t tell the difference anyway since they don’t spelunk into the details.

dd

Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?

Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.

I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.