For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
People keep mentioning Firefox but fail to realize that Google, as the sole sponsor of Mozilla Corporation (not to be confused with Mozilla Foundation), can just kindly ask for Firefox to follow suit and gimp itself, just like it did before with a move to webextensions. Gotta admit it, Google has won the web, what they say (eventually) goes.
From my memory of their financials, they actually get enough donations for the browser. The issue is the for profit companies fetish for a million different side quests.
Firefox is partially in this position because the community really does not support Firefox. Every decision Firefox makes or Mozilla makes in an attempt to try and claw back their financial freedom away from Google, the community dumpsters them on. Then, on posts like this, the community turns around and dumpsters Firefox for being so financially dependent on Google.
FireFox was and is an awesome project, but unfortunately, without the financial backing of a large for-profit business, they cannot keep up with Chrome. Even then, FireFox, with an engineering team a quarter the size of Chrome’s, still manages to keep up, which is a god damn miracle.
Developing a browser that is fast, actually works with new web standards, stays up to date, and is adding features is incredibly difficult. It is a stupidly expensive endeavor, similar to the level of effort necessary for operating systems.
And unfortunately, there is no Linux equivalent for web browsers, at least not right now. There are some up-and-coming projects, but it’s going to be decades before they reach the level of maturity necessary to start competing against Chrome. At which point there may be so much standards capture that some of these browsers may find it impossible to actually catch up.
If Firefox had enough market share to be a problem for Google, or would probably also have enough money to not need Google.
Google doesn’t even need to get their hands dirty like that. IMO all they need to do is continue making it difficult for companies to support Firefox when designing their websites. That, in addition to making sure companies know that Google is tirelessly working to make sure Chrome won’t work with ad blockers is going to eventually kill Firefox completely.
google can just stop funding mozilla and it will be dead in tracks as are all the forks that goes with it,.
Glass half full time:
Making adblockers available to only people on the far fringe that are going to go through the extraordinary hoops to get it to work makes it less important to them to stymie the act of adblocking, because far fewer people are doing it. Businesses half-ass everything and do the lowest cost thing like always, so they will not bother to ever commit the token effort to stop the few remaining adblockers, making it trivially easy to perform the adblocking by comparison to today. The pendulum always swings, in everything, and one of the big factors that cause it to swing back even when all seems lost is that the current group or way of thinking that is at the forefront today has its group members get lazy and complacent in their superior position, creating opportunities for the opposition.
If there are no remaining mainstream browsers that support ad blockers that pendulum is going to take a long time to swing back.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Now they’re basically making us work on it. Sometimes loud obvious actions like this are the catalyst to more drastic response. Everything often seems to always stay the same, but everything stays the same up until the very second it doesn’t. Nobody knows when that will be, but it will be.
if their go at web drm eventually ever comes to fruition, you can expect the fringe to be expelled from all but a few niche communities.
similar to what they are doing to private/custom android with the qr codes and play integrity and whatever else.
Considering the fact that they can’t help but deliver short-term profit over all else, set the bar so low that the term “minimum viable product” is an everyday saying, and security is regarded as an inconvenient nuisance with no penalty for slacking on, I still like our chances even if they pull that off.
Consider these facts:
I think everything seems so inevitable to most people because of mental and ideological inertia combined with the fact that nobody can predict when and how major societal changes will occur. If nothing surprising that nobody predicted or thought of before happened then our future is inevitable and the current winners and losers will remain so. Fortunately for us, though, our whole history is one long string of surprising things that nobody predicted or thought of before happening.
i like our chances of thriving in an alternative internet like in here, or building our own stuff that could be used for good. it’s is an immensely important resource some people take for granted and we should fight for it. however:
1 - the great majority of people accept it and the fringes are discarded as not profitable. the definitive wall where people draw the line goes further the more it’s normalized and the breaking point isn’t near. it’s already coming to your android phone.
2 - remember elected representatives don’t represent the people. they will go back at the slightest hint of disrupting business especially for banking and shopping. exemptions for the powerful aren’t out of the question on anything, plenty of that already.
3 - we are living through a global oil crisis that is starving people worldwide, many wars, genocide, nuclear tension and the rise of fascism. the splinternet is often talked about as being in the horizon. we are lucky to be in relative isolation so far.
things often seem inevitable because they are in bad shape. we are still scrambling over the ongoing fascism and we’ve been compounding the climate crisis without a care in the world.
i’m not saying it’s impossible or that we should quit. just that we need a realistic view of what we are up against, and who calls the shots right now.
then we’ll move again, like we did with chrome. this game of cat and mouse is easy to keep up and really only serves to harm these companys in the long run.
Move to what and where? Browsers are basically OS’s at this point, even MS stopped developing its own. Ladybird is going to be a joke and don’t think any other company or community is coming to write a new one.
Except they aren’t moving anymore.
I think Google finally trapped most of the web’s population, for good.
This. The number of people (real people, not internet people) I know who just keep using Chrome or other Google products without care is shocking.
That’s theirchoice is all I’ll say, I know plenty went to fire for for these reasons, it stands to reason they’ll do it again.
Like how they killed JPEG-XL.
All over some employee’s ego associated with his AVIF contributions, from what I’ve seen.