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Comment by gerash | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting tired of this manifest v3 drama on HN. Why don't people who oppose it band together and fork Chromium and maintain that fork. The software is open source at the end of the day.

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Because it's not really about MV3 but about the largest ad and tracking network on the planet changing the most popular web browser to cripple ad blocking under the disguise of security.

I wonder if this is the prelude to unblockable government propaganda. Already get it on all the social media after all.

Calling it now, let's see in a couple of years how deep the state really is.

Maybe, but let's not allow the government boogeyman to blind us to the direct and immediate threat, which is adtech and surveillance economy.

But that’s not what’s happening here, how is anything Firefox does with their switch crippling adblocking?

What's happening is step 1 - Firefox buying into MV3, even if with its own tweaks, and mentioning that DNR is a thing that will happen eventually. Step 2 - once people get used to it and drama dies down - the implementation will likely become very close to Chrome, under the guise of not fragmenting the dev experience and similar nonsense excuses.

These moves keep happening in tech all the time. Slippery slope fallacy doesn't work here - if you see something that looks like slippery slope in a tech business, it almost definitely is one.

But they never mention removing WebRequest, only having DNR in addition where it makes sense for performance reasons (and for compatibility with chrome), not having it would be stupid. I’m all for slippery slope arguments, if they are well-founded, not if it sounds like wild conspiracy theories.

Is your claim that firefox and chrome are joining forces as part of a conspiracy to prop up advertisers?

Quite frankly i feel like every time a web browser is mentioned on hn, everyone reaches to weird conspiracies.

> Is your claim that firefox and chrome are joining forces as part of a conspiracy to prop up advertisers?

No, because there is no conspiracy needed. Chrome is a product of an adtech company, and Firefox is funded by the very same one. Mozilla is at best fighting a losing battle here, forced to make concessions to survive. Or, it could be argued that Firefox exists only to serve as an antitrust shield for Google.

> forced to make concessions to survive

I disagree

> Or, it could be argued that Firefox exists only to serve as an antitrust shield for Google.

That might well be why google funds them. I can’t say I mind, and it doesn’t make them more user-unfriendly.

>it doesn’t make them more user-unfriendly

Mozilla or Google?

If Mozilla: Do you think that Mozilla would think of their users' privacy if it meant alienating Google and loosing their money? I'm not picking a side here - I have no idea so I'm just asking.

> Do you think that Mozilla would think of their users' privacy if it meant alienating Google

Yes. One example is tracking protection, which blocks Google Analytics on every FF installation by default.

I'm puzzled why you think supporting DNR is a bad thing. I get the argument that it feels like it moves closer to abandoning blocking web requests, and that's probably more a question of trust than anything.

But there are valid technical reasons to support DNR. It really does make more sense from a performance point of view, if it happens to support what you need. If not, then it's good to have blocking web requests available. And there's good reason to be unhappy if Firefox drops them. I don't see any strong incentives for doing so, though.

> I'm puzzled why you think supporting DNR is a bad thing.

You actually got it in your first paragraph - for me, it's a trust issue. I don't trust Mozilla to retain web request blocking, particularly when DNR becomes established in Firefox and most extensions migrate: because then, the argument for removal web request blocking will be, "look, there's very few legitimate extensions using this, and it's a Huge Security Hole, and everyone standardized on DNR already".

> Last fall [i.e. 2019], we announced our intention to support add-ons in Mozilla’s reinvented Firefox for Android browser (...) In the next few weeks, uBlock Origin will be the first add-on to become available in the new Firefox for Android.

Sounds to me like uBlock is literally top priority for Mozilla, so I don't see why they would do that.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/02/06/ublock-origin-for...

> The software is open source at the end of the day.

Then you can point to the source of widevine? Something that chrome developers called a core component when they where caught side loading it on dedicated open source distros a few years ago and initially refused to supply an option to disable it?

Chrome is not fully open source, so any fork would be somewhat reduced.

I don't know if the original post was edited, but it says chromium, not chrome.

It always said chromium, but I find that people actually mean "chrome but open source" when they say "chromium", when that's not really the case at all.

I’m no expert, but I think the main moat that Chrome has here is its web store where users find extensions and developers submit their extensions. There’s a review process which whilst far from perfect is labor intensive and still helps catch rogue extensions. Hard to open-source this part of Chrome.

There's an OSS fork of Chromium for Android called Kiwi that enables installing extensions from the Chrome Web Store.

Which still relies on the Chrome Web store.

Which will stop accepting MV2 Extensions after the move to MV3

Therefore leaving you without a store again

You also can't use Google services with unofficial build. That includes Sync, Translate and bunch of other stuff.

That’s a feature for me. I don’t want to have to sign into my browser or have it phoning home constantly. It’s a privacy risk.

Because it's not an easy job and people would have to devote significant free time to it.

Exactly. So get behind the wheel and do something (eg. fork Chromium without MV3 or something like that). But if you're not willing to spend your own time and energy then what's the point of constantly complaining about conspiracies surrounding MV3 on HN. It's tiring to read.

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