The “Manifest V3” rollout is back after letting tensions cool for a year.
Google’s sales pitch for Manifest V3 is that, by limiting extensions, the browser can be lighter on resources, and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers.
Emphases mine. Funny, I use extensions to protect my privacy from Google.
Chromium needs to be fully divested from Google. End of story. There’s too much conflict of interest in letting the world’s largest advertising company have this much control over one of the two major browsers. If you don’t see the problem with that, imagine if Taco Bell was also the world’s largest producer of anti-diarrhea medicine.
The second being Safari, right?
Right?
…right…
As a web developer, Safari needs to either die in a fire or be transferred to a company that actually cares. It’s more than half a decade behind everybody else.
Tell me about it. Every time I implement some new thing in my app:
Firefox/Chrome: You cast HTML5 video. Critical hit!
Safari: Your spell fizzles…
… Safari added support for HTML5 video in 2009. Chrome did not even exist yet in 2009.
In fact, Safari was the first to support it. At the time you had to use Flash to deliver video in every other browser.
Firefox added a half assed implementation of the video tag shortly after Safari but it wasn’t fully supported until 2013 according to caniuse.com. In fact FireFox was the last browser to fully support HTML5 video.
Not looking to start a flame war here, but if that’s the case, then Apple’s had even longer to get it right. lol. I implemented my video containers using the MDN specs which worked for both FF and Chrom(e/ium) as-is. Had to read through Apple-specific specs to figure out why Safari wouldn’t render them (not autoplay but render at all).
While it’s not quite “IE all over again”, it’s in the ballpark where I have to make special concessions to support a specific browser that is only offered on one company’s platform. History may not be repeating, but it’s certainly rhyming.
Ah - that’s got nothing to do with supported features. Apple has always been a major backer of web based video distribution - a lot of the tech (from video formats to delivery platforms like HTTP Live Streaming to the tag were partially or even fully invented by Apple.
Your video wasn’t working because the by default Safari assumes (correctly) that most video on the web is an ad. Safari generally only tolerates text/image ads* and to get video to work, you need to make it clear to Safari that the video is a real video the user wants to see.
Safari also silently blocks something like 99% of cookies… only cookies that behave like login/session/etc cookies are allowed. That’s a lot more problematic than blocking video… since there’s often just no way around it.
(* even text/image ads are barely tolerated… as far as I know, Safari is the only major browser that includes explicit support for ad blockers - Chrome/FireFox/etc allow extensions to arbitrarily manipulate the page, but safari actually has an ad blocking API - though they call it “content blocking”).
Chrome released in 2008,but did not support HTML5 video until 2010. But yes, Safari did it first (in 2008). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
It also took 6 years longer than everybody else to support WebGL2, and it’s the only browser without a working WebGPU implementation. It also has no timeline for wasm-gc, while Chrome already ships with it default enabled and Firefox will ship with it on the next release.
It also has no timeline for wasm-gc
Apple has been removing support for garbage collection from other technologies that used to support it. Wouldn’t be surprised if they never add support for that, they’ll tell you not to waste CPU cycles (and therefore, battery power) collecting garbage.
They want you to figure out when memory should be deallocated at compile time, not run time.
I personally prefer to use such languages, but I often don’t have a choice for certain tech stacks.
Yeah, when testing my sites, on the desktop at least, I don’t even bother testing in Safari. It ends up with nothing but headaches and a bunch of kludges to make things work there. Reminds me of working with IE years ago. But at least with desktop Safari, it has such a small market share that ignoring it isn’t problematic.
Firefox gang rise up!
sad WebKit noises
I really like Orion, which is based on WebKit… but it’s Mac only. 😢
Why would it be? Maybe if you looked at market share just for mobile devices. But on desktop it’s limited to just macOS.
I’m mostly joking.
Mostly.
Remember, Firefox is great and has no dependency on upstream Google code.
Use Firefox.
Preaching to the wrong crowd there buddy, you want to be convincing the exact type of person who isn’t on Lemmy
I’m pretty sure ad experience will move some masses, I liked Chrome because Ublock works fine there, it has great extensions support and the best compatibility with the websites, but if you remove the adblocker support I would have moved (if I hadn’t already) in a heartbeat
The one and only, my beloved 🔥🦊
Firefox is my daily, but the fact I have to fire up a chromium browser to use web serial or midi is an endless annoyance. Mozilla won’t add that functionality as they see it as a security risk.
? I’m quite positive I’ve used MIDI in Firefox on hooktheory.
Honestly, in my opinion it kind of is (though I’m not an expert on it). Except for convenience I don’t think a browser should be allowed to access my USB devices. Though I would welcome it if it was enabled with the same kind of request that pops up when a browser wants to access the microphone or camera.
That is, quite literally, how it works in Chromium. Mozilla still sees it as a security risk, even with user permissions. Honestly, having to boot Chromium is a bigger security risk.
For a while I was a bit confused, because Mozilla said they would also implement V3 Manifest …
by implementing Manifest V3 on its own terms, Mozilla saves developers who are switching to the new platform from having to support two different versions of their extensions (for Google Chrome and Firefox) at the same time. On the other hand, it allows content-blocking extensions that were originally built using the less restrictive Manifest V2 to continue working at full tilt.
https://adguard.com/en/blog/firefox-manifestv3-chrome-adblocking.html
You have a choice A. Be a Chad who Dumps Chrome and chromium based browsers . or B. remain a whiny loser who has to deal with ads.
Firefox has been fantastic for me.
Even without all this ad blocker bs from Google, I like Firefox a lot better than the chrome based browser I used before, opera.
It’s a lot cleaner and feels faster
Google can go fuck themselves for this. The moment their stupid Manifest v3 bullshit came to light, I quickly migrated to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
As someone who never switched to chrome in the first place, it’s fun to watch all the smoke and fire now.
Mozilla was quite the memory hog, back in the day. In some respects, it still is, but it’s certainly better than this Manifest v3 crap.
Firefox is probably the oldest browser in existence. The only surviving one among the original three (Netscape Navigator). The fact that it’s still among the major two is impressive by itself.
Same. As I’m seeing what’s happening with Google, im glad I made that choice
Firefox is just the only decent option. And while at it, use Piped or Invidious while you still can, people!
I tried using Invidious, but found that it misses quite a lot of new posts in my subscriptions. So in the end I ahem flew to Ukraine to take advantage of family Premium for around £3 a month.
Because honestly, I have no real problem paying for Premium, but I massively object to paying £20 A MONTH to watch (mostly) amateur content that YouTube aren’t actually paying anyone to commission. How is Disney+ almost half the damn cost of a YT Premium family plan? Because Google are money-grubbing cunts, that’s how.
Mine has been working fine, but the instance did lose all my “Mark as watched” videos, and for some reason one specific channel never makes into the Subscriptions panel, but I just have it as a favourite and it ends up almost the same. The instance I was using for Piped is now borked, so I’m hanging onto Invidious for now.
Newpipe is damn near perfect. No ads either.
I’d recommend archiving all of the channels you can from Youtube, it’s clear they don’t want our traffic at all.
I mean, yeah. They absolutely don’t want to be spending bandwidth on those of us who use adblockers. What I don’t think a lot of people realize is that Google is perfectly happy with the people who are essentially never served an ad not using the service anymore. Saves them money.
I meant firefox and non chrome users in general but yeah
Everything you said is correct. But the infuriating part is that YouTube reached that position by killing off its competition. YouTube wouldn’t be the only one standing now if they had shown the same behavior 10 years ago. Even more infuriating is that there are a lot of people around who support this entitlement from Google - because you know, you’re stealing from the creators! All creators should find a way to accept donations without feeding the abusive corporation.
Mozilla is implementing Manifest V3. They plan to implement it slightly different than Chrome: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-firefox-recap-next-steps/
They have published a guide for extension developers: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest-v3-migration-guide/
More background on Manifest V3:
https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2019/07/googles-plans-chrome-extensions-wont-really-help-security
https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2021/11/manifest-v3-open-web-politics-sheeps-clothing
https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
https://www.eff.org/am/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation
Relevant part from the blog post:
What are we doing differently in Firefox? WebRequest
One of the most controversial changes of Chrome’s MV3 approach is the removal of blocking WebRequest, which provides a level of power and flexibility that is critical to enabling advanced privacy and content blocking features. Unfortunately, that power has also been used to harm users in a variety of ways. Chrome’s solution in MV3 was to define a more narrowly scoped API (declarativeNetRequest) as a replacement. However, this will limit the capabilities of certain types of privacy extensions without adequate replacement.
Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest. We will continue to work with content blockers and other key consumers of this API to identify current and future alternatives where appropriate. Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we are committed to ensuring that Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.
i wish mozilla would just drop webextensions and webmanifest. webextensions are terrible. :/
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friends dont let friends use google chrome
for those who haven’t switched to firefox, might i recommend:
https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher - which adds a chrome like profile switcher to your firefox toolbars
and
https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox - which changes the look of firefox to chrome’s new 2023 material design refresh
edit: sorry! see the reply below i had the wrong repo for the updated materialfox. it’s actually: https://github.com/edelvarden/material-fox-updated
MaterialFox hasn’t been updated in a very long time, unless you’re talking about a fork and just copied the wrong link?
sorry!
i remembered it was a fork that i saw which had the material refresh and i went back and sure enough it was further down in my starred repositories!
the correct link is: https://github.com/edelvarden/material-fox-updated
for reference i found it through: https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/17a9a6l/implemented_chrome_refresh_2023_redesign_in/
ah ok, very cool!
How does this compare to using FF containers? Separate bookmarks or something along those lines?
it just basically uses different profiles with -no-remote to open two completely different instances with their own bookmarks, history, etc.
Enterprise users with the “ExtensionManifestV2Availability” policy turned on will get an extra year of Manifest V2 compatibility.
Who are these enterprise users 🤨 🤔…
Any way of migrating chrome passwords to other password managers? And any good free password managers? That’s what’s keeping me from switching
Bitwarden has a great free tier, it’s open source, and cross platform. I highly recommend it!
https://bitwarden.com/help/import-from-chrome/
If you want something that’s not cloud focused, check out KeepassXC too!
Another vote for bitwarden, mobile apps are great as well. If you are so inclined, it can be self-hosted if you want to retain full control
@xenspidey @DolphinMath one note though, BitWarden requires MSSQL (you read that right, Microsoft SQL Server).
I believe Vaultwarden works with SQLite and Postgres if that were a concern.
https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki/Using-the-PostgreSQL-Backend
@DolphinMath correct. But Vaultwarden is not the official thing. Not saying it’s bad, just something to keep in mind.
@rysiek Fair enough! Not official in the sense that the Bitwarden team doesn’t support it I suppose.
It definitely has some community backing though.
In chrome, you can export the passwords to a CSV file. You can then use the CSV file to import the passwords into Firefox or a password manager.
Here are the instructions for bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com/help/import-from-chrome/
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A year later, Google is restarting the phase-out schedule, and while it has changed some things, Chrome will eventually be home to inferior filtering extensions.
Google’s blog post says the plan to kill Manifest V2, the current format for Chrome extensions, is back on starting June 2024.
The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time.
On the high end now for me, Slack is drinking 500MB, while a single Google Chat tab, created by this company that is so concerned about performance, is at 1.5GB of memory usage.
Google is adding a completely arbitrary limit on how many “rules” content filtering add-ons can include, which are needed to keep up with the nearly infinite ad-serving sites that are out there (by the way, Ars Technica subscriptions give you an ad-free reading experience and make a great holiday gift!).
Mozilla’s blog post on the subject promises “Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions.”
Saved 72% of original text.
AdGuard (system wide), PiHole, inbuilt adblockers are still there and won’t be affected by this. Who cares.
Adguard and pihole rely on DNS redirects - googs has already implemented “secure DNS” for Chrome in Android, which circumvents network level/local DNS by connecting to a Google owned DNS, serving content using those listings instead.
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
Yes, one should use Firefox. Yes that could also avoid the android problem, but also no, because Google forces chrome at weird times (eg, some apps will load a minimal web viewer for hyperlinks links, without leaving the app - sometimes apps don’t respect the default browser setting and instead just use chrome.
🤷
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
That’s not how that works. Other chromium browsers get to decide what source code they pull into thier own project. They can totally continue using regular DNS.
Adguard and pihole rely on DNS redirects - googs has already implemented “secure DNS” for Chrome in Android, which circumvents network level/local DNS by connecting to a Google owned DNS, serving content using those listings instead.
You can chose many different neutral DNS in AdGuard/Pihole and also in Android (quad9, for instance). In Android I use my own AdGuard Home instance as my DoT server.
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
Inbuilt AdBlockers work well and wont’ be affected by MV3, as they are not extensions. Don’t spread FUD.
Yes, one should use Firefox.
No need to be so masochistic and I wouldn’t use it regardlessly. I don’t want to give undeserved market share to corrupt Mozilla Corp. I’d rather watch ads. But, as I said, there’s no need for that, because between DNS blocker and inbuilt adblockers of better browsers, I haven’t seen a single fucking ad in ages.
“… corrupt Mozilla Corp …”
Could you elaborate?
They believe that Mozilla taking Google’s money is bad. But they think Brave surreptitiously changing urls to affiliate links and selling user data to ai bros is totally peachy.
Really, as with anyone who knows about Brave’s tomfoolery but accepts it with open arms, he just seems to be a supporter of their CEO, Brendan Eich, who’s a Silicon Valley douche and bigot. This seems to be supported by the particular animosity shown toward Mozilla, from where Eich was unceremoniously expelled from (due to the wave of negative PR that resulted form his being named their CEO) just before starting Brave.
Guy’s a fanboy. And one that has no problem. Throwing slurs around when discussing things like software. It’s best to just ignore him.
I mean if you’re going to go Chromium-based at least use Vivaldi… Brave-s benefits minus Brave’s shithousery
I switched to Vivaldi a couple months ago, and previously used brave in the past before growing to dislike it. It surprises me how many brave-heads ignore Vivaldi’s existence. It’s just a better Brave. No crypto BS and lots of poweruser features.
Removed by mod
What’s your setup then?
They decided to commit suicide?
That maneuver will cost them a few % market share at best. Most people don’t even use ad blockers at all
Funnily enough I think the percentage use of adblockers is going to go up a fair bit thanks to what Google is doing. My amazingly sweet “just go along with anything” MIL actually complained to me about YouTube ads the other day, then ads on websites in general. She jumped at my offer to install a different YouTube client and a good adblocker once I explained that it was a possibility for her tablet.
If they wanted to pull this off they needed to do it quietly, not draw attention to the fact that adblockers exist and are apparently so effective they need to do something very public about them.
You would think, but the number of people I’ve met who surf the web without any adblockers at all and just seem fine with it is alarming. I think Google is counting on a lot of people just not knowing any better.
Won’t stop me from informing them otherwise though.
they already know they have the numbers allowing them not to care… ‘acceptable losses’. its not like they didnt already analyze this decision to death
Doesn’t really matter at this point, I have already uninstalled chrome on all devices at home and work. I guess Google can still try to slow down other browsers on YouTube and other Google services though.
Trust me when I say this - they will keep pushing until their services are no longer usable at all on anything other than chrome. And they will find enough money to keep the antitrust regulators quiet. Meanwhile a big chunk of those who switched away from chrome will return to it - because principles are not bigger than convenience. Meanwhile, those with enough constitution to stay put will find themselves excluded from a large part of the web - a digital pariah, if you will.
Yeah I don’t doubt at all that Google will try. I’m a bit more optimistic than you that we will continue to have ways to get around their bullshit though.
I really really want their bullshit to be defeated and freedom to prevail. What I described towards the end is partially my experience. But it’s not a complete loss yet. I’m trying to get everyone off chrome, and more people seem to be listening this time.
