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Comment by jeanlucas | Hacker News Reader

It did not hit me yet, but I'm already rewriting my extensions to firefox to switch if Chrome really axes uBO

It's not if. It's when. It has been 'when' since 2020. It is coming. It is not going to not come. It will be here in mere releases. Get ready.

Yeah, hence why I started already migrating, slowly.

I have a simple tab organizer extension and some greasemonkey scripts that should work perfectly fine on Firefox without any changes.

You're probably right, but FWIW it's not unheard of for google to announce, continually delay, and eventually completely backtrack on things like this, like third party cookie deprecation.

This time it affects their bottom line in a profound way so wishful thinking is probably not going to work unfortunately.

> affects their bottom line in a profound way

Something around 8% of total digital ad spend.

To be fair, that's tremendous

Source?

>third party cookie deprecation

It's because they were literally sued and are not allowed to remove it, not because they don't want to.

I am switching family over to Brave. They don’t even notice the difference and I’m more confident the browser will continue to support user centric content filtering.

Which is fine so long as what they have built into the browser is all you need (and so long as Google does not sabotage those efforts). If ever you might need more such as what uBO offers, though, Brave is also subject to whatever changes Google makes (such as Manifest V3).

Is that going to help? Brave is still blink. They might have some filtering baked in but I’m not sure if it’s as powerful (or can be) as UBO.

Brave will keep Manifest V2 compatibility as long as they can, specifically focusing on "AdGuard AdBlocker, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix". https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

I guess I'm curious what "as long as they can" actually means. If it means they can't pull upstream Blink without losing v2 support, that's bad.

I think Firefox is the only viable solution to continue using UBO at this point.

I seem to recall they said as long as it was technically AND economically feasible. It depends on how much google attempts to spread the cancer of mv3 throughout their code base. Eventually brave won’t have the manpower to hack v2 in is the likely result without going bankrupt if google really wants to go down that path.

I don't think the new manifest rules are because of any actual restriction or the engine, maybe I'm wrong but it was my impression that the change is mostly just Google wanting to control what users can do with their browsers even more (and always in ways that make them profit of course). So they should be able to keep V2 support if they're willing to be on the hook for keeping it maintained themselves.

And if the removal of manifest v2 allows google to abandon/remove/refactor code exposed through it (and google could even be inclined to do so deliberately)? At some point Brave would end up having to maintain its own fork, which they probably don't have the resources to do.

It's already axed in canary release

I'm still at the "This extension may soon no longer be supported" warning

2 days ago: "Chrome Canary just killed uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2 extensions" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757178

> I'm already rewriting my extensions to firefox

What does that mean? Firefox uses the same API. At most you have to change `background.service_worker` to `background.scripts` (literally just rename the key)

For those unaware, what is uBO and how would it affect most extensions?

"uBO" is an abbreviation of "uBlock Origin".

uBO (uBlock Origin) is a popular open source ad blocker. There is a change coming to the way Google Chrome and some other browsers host extensions called manifest v3, which for (stated) security and privacy purposes limits a lot of the functionality that makes ad blockers work the way they do. There are workarounds but they are suboptimal. This has been an ongoing fight for years and there are plenty of accusations that Google is doing this because they want to cripple ad blockers since they make so much money from advertising. Firefox has explicitly stated they will not force these changes on extension developers, and thus a lot of people have been threatening to move to Firefox whenever Google finally makes this change for real.

Maybe it’s a telling sign of the new wave of HN users, but I’m genuinely surprised to read that you don’t know what uBlock is..

I'm happy youngsters still use this ol' forum

It’s good that we are still getting Youngbloods who see the superiority of text in communications rather than one sided talking head videos.

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