Google Chrome is looking to finish off the various bypasses that help uBlock Origin and other such MV2 extensions to keep functioning. Edge and Opera could soon follow too.

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.

  • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    18 hours ago

    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.

      • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        19 hours ago

        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.

    • ☂️-@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      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.

      • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        17 hours ago

        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:

        • Implementing the features you’re describing is draconian and widely disliked, even by many of those that tolerate it and comply.
        • Many nations are legally challenging the use of cryptography, a critical pillar of the way the Internet works. Removing it would require sweeping changes to how it could be used and render many everyday tasks like shopping and banking very problematic or even impossible, which would be globally unpopular, disruptive, and economically damaging primarily to the ones doing it.
        • We live in a time of unprecedented global stability that has persisted since before the Internet existed and the Information Age began, which appears to be unraveling before our eyes. This stability facilitated the Internet being one global thing everyone built and used together. Only international agreements make this situation possible and ongoing.

        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.

        • ☂️-@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          16 hours ago

          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.