Hey all, I was about to setup uBlock Origin in chromium, when I saw the notice that it may soon be ended due to not following best practices, etc. I looked this up and some articles and posts state that Chrome is discontinuing content blockers / ad blockers soon. Will this apply to the chromium app in Linux?
Other than for testing purposes, my usage of Chromium is for the ability to make some sites into webApps. I just like some to be isolated with their own window and icon. The standard response I see to pretty much anyone is that they should switch to Firefox and stop wanting the webApp. I saw some comments that Firefox does not and will not implement webApps due to some security issues (?? not sure why). I don’t understand how it is difficult just make a standalone window with a custom icon choice. I see no reason that has to compromise anything at all, but I am not a developer.
I’m getting off-track here. So, is Chromium going to go the way Google wants it to go for Chrome? It was my understanding that Chromium is kind of an offshoot and not just up to Google in terms of its course. Will we be able to use extensions that Google doesn’t want, and have to get them from a new repository instead of the chrome web store?
Any insight on this would be appreciated, thanks.
Edit: it appears the PWA support in Firefox is not ideal, see responses to this comment.
Chromium is not an offshoot of Chrome, it’s more of a precursor to Chrome, and it is completely controlled by Google. As such, it will also drop support for extensions that do not support Manifest v3.
If you want to enable PWA support in Firefox, it looks like this is possible (however the experience doesn’t seem to be great, see responses to this comment): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Installing
For other browser suggestions see, e.g. https://www.xda-developers.com/4-browsers-manifest-v2-ublock-origin/
There are a couple interesting browser these days, for example floorp. It’s always interesting to check who is behind a browser, in the case of floorp it’s a Japanese company which I like.
They might still pull a corporate fast one on you, but at least they will apologise profusely over it. It’s also genuinely a nice browser, obviously fully open source and privacy focused. I think it’s a nice filter between my browser and mozilla which lost some trust from me over time.
They are deprecating the underlying technology(called manifest V2 or MV2 for short) and replacing it with a different one(MV3) that lacks some of the capabilities for some kind of adblocking.
So yeah, it’s pretty much dead on chromium. The developers of brave have commited to provide a best effort support for their browser though: https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
Firefox on the other end has no intention of deprecating support for MV2 so any browsers based on that are fine. Keep in mind MV3 supports some adblocking and some Adblockers have already moved to it, it’s just a lesser extent.
There’s a less capable Mv3 port of uBlock Origin by the original developer, called ‘uBlock Origin Lite’: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh
I use Chromium only very rarely, so I don’t know how effective it is, though.
I used it on a relatives computer recently. On streaming sports sites it got about 90% of ads but did miss the transparent overlays that open a new page when clicked. UbO handles all of that just fine.
Yeah I saw it.
Brave and Vivaldi have both mentioned they intend to support V2 ongoing.
Brave was more like screw them we got this.
Vivaldi was hesitant and said they would do it as long as they could.
In the case of Brave (or Vivaldi, to a certain extent) it doesn’t matter too much, as it has a very capable built-in adblocker. It’s not an extension, so it is not going to be weakened by MV3.
MV3 doesn’t make adblockers impossible, only less effective. It’s important to note that MV3 has changed a fair bit since the initial controversy and isn’t quite as limiting as it used to be. The fact that adblockers will lose some functionality at all is still a dealbreaker for me and many others which I thankfully won’t have to deal with as a Firefox user, but it isn’t going to kill adblockers on Chrome and most users will probably just install an MV3-compatible adblocker and move on with their day.
uBlock Origin’s developers don’t seem to want to make a proper MV3 port, which is fair because they’d probably have to rewrite most of the extension, but they did create the far more minimal uBlock Orgin Lite, which a lot of people have taken to be an attempt at porting uBlock Origin to MV3. It isn’t that. On top of MV3’s limitations, it also makes the decision to work within these self-imposed restrictions:
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No broad host permissions at install time – extended permissions are granted explicitly by the user on a per-site basis.
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Entirely declarative for reliability and CPU/memory efficiency.
These aren’t MV3 limitations, just a thing Gorhill decided to do. See the FAQ. You can get much closer to uBlock Origin within MV3’s constraints than uBlock Origin Lite does. Right now, the best option appears to be AdGuard, which has been making a true best-effort attempt at porting their adblocker to MV3 pretty much since the announcement.
Hey, the moment it becomes less than the best, I’m out lol. I guess it’s goodbye chromium.
It’s actually not what I was using; I was using nativefier to make webapp using electron. I guess I’m just gonna ditch all these ideas and just stick to Firefox and that’s it.
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Here is another concerning reason to not use Chrome.
Isolated web apps… ewww
You can use webapp Manager to get web apps for Firefox and apparently official PWA support is also coming
Nice! Thanks.
so you have to decide: you want websites inside their own window with a nice icon, or you want to get ridd of ads.
if the first is imperative to you, the choice is simple. watch ads.
Yeah clearly that’s the choice. It’s not a huge deal obviously I’m just using the sites in Firefox I was just hoping chromium was a possibility.
The thing is, we (you know, us) are very dependent upon Firefox and their management has really exhibited some stubbornness in the recent years with regard to some issues that the user-base really don’t agree with. No I’m not citing examples I just have encountered this more than once or twice in the recent years with a variety of issues.
