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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Do we yet know what the status of uBlock or a uBlock fork for Manifest V3 is? I know it won't be able to have all the same features, but it certainly will be doable, but have the authors fully set their minds up about not converting their extension? Has anyone decided to fork it and do it?

I don't really care about all the fight about Chrome vs Firefox, I just want to know if someone will port uBlock to MV3.

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> I don't really care about all the fight about Chrome vs Firefox

And this is why Google has the ability to force things like Manifest V3 down people's throats.

Glad I stopped using Chrome years ago.

The fact that I don't want to partake in childish browser wars is the reason Chrome has larger user share?

Apple has the exact same limitation on Safari yet no one claims "Apple forced Declarative API down people's throat" and actually praise them for the privacy it brings.

I'm perfectly fine with extensions not being able to snoop of every single request I make. It's fine for you to disagree. If anything, it sounds like people here trying to shove their preference of Firefox down everyone's throat.

I wouldn't say your browser complacency is _why_ Chrome can do this, but it is a large sign of _how_ they can shove their weight around.

Most people use chrome and don't care.

> I just want to know if someone will port uBlock to MV3.

What's the point in porting uBlock to MV3 if it means neutering it? You already have numerous other ad blockers which don't go all the way and have stuff like "acceptable" ads.

How is it neutering it? Can you specifically list the features that would not be possible under MV3, and how commonly used said features are by the average people who install the extension and don't customize anything?

Raymond Hill, the developer of uBlock Origin said that "removing the blocking ability of the webRequest API means the death of uBO" in this comment

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

You can follow the issue tracker for any progress related to MV3 development of uBO but from what I can see, there isn't much interest yet in porting uBO to MV3 because it's not worth it.

This EFF article also goes into details about why MV3 is harmful for adblockers.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-st...

That comment you link is from 2019, and Google has made many substantial changes to MV3 since in response to the feedback. It obviously still doesn't give as much power as WebRequest API, but they still addressed many complaints and increased a lot of the limits.

The EFF article is pretty recent and it doesn't look good either. I haven't come across ongoing work for a port of uBO to MV3. If there isn't, that says a lot as well.

Whatever MV3 may offer, I for one do not want adblockers to be compromised. If anything, they should be more powerful rather than less. Hypothetically and optimistically speaking, even if a MV3 port of uBO offers 80% of the current functionally, it would still be detrimental for browsing the "modern" web.

Personally I'm not going to worry about switching until the old API is deprecated, but it should be very simple to write an adblocker for Manifest v3. You could put together an MVP by plugging EasyList into the new APIs in probably ten minutes. Obviously a fully-featured blocker requires a lot more time than that though.

I'd actually expect a small performance increase because the browser is preloading the block list, rather than querying it every time.

uBlock does provide some other feature like disabling network pre-fetching, and I'm not sure if those can be fully replicated. But I tend to prefer the performance improvement of pre-fetching anyway.

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