Madis

But it would use less energy afterwards? At least that was claimed with the 4o model for example.

Yes, by default every Chromium browser is affected. It is just a matter of

• whether they want to extend it to the enterprise time (which Edge and Opera won’t do IIRC)
• whether they’d try to keep it working after enterprise time (maybe Brave and Vivaldi, but it could take a lot of effort)
• whether they even have an alternative place to download extensions from if CWS takes MV2 extensions down (Brave has some workaround for few extensions, not sure about others)

Maybe there will be some devs working on Ungoogled Chromium to keep the support, but they also have to think where users would even get the extensions from.

We will now [Oct 9] begin disabling installed extensions still using Manifest V2 in Chrome stable. This change will be slowly rolled out over the following weeks. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension. For a short time, users will still be able to turn their Manifest V2 extensions back on. Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will be exempt from any browser changes until June 2025.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate/mv2-deprecation-timeline#october_9th_2024_an_update_on_manifest_v2_phase-out

So there is no single date for normal users, but June 2025 is fixed for enterprise (and expected date for Brave, Vivaldi)

uBOL is entirely declarative, meaning there is no need for a permanent uBOL process for the filtering to occur, and CSS/JS injection-based content filtering is performed reliably by the browser itself rather than by the extension. This means that uBOL itself does not consume CPU/memory resources while content blocking is ongoing – uBOL’s service worker process is required only when you interact with the popup panel or the option pages.

uBOL does not require broad “read/modify data” permission at install time, hence its limited capabilities out of the box compared to uBlock Origin or other content blockers requiring broad “read/modify data” permissions at install time.

Emphasis mine. No background processes, including a website-reading permission does indeed sound more optimized for mobile, where people may have limited resources.

I’d be super down for one that folds flat, and does away with the huge camera bump. Get me a nice stylus, a foldable keyboard and a simple folding support to hold the phone at an angle, and that’s essentially a desktop that can fit into your pockets.

So essentially your concerns are the camera bump and stylus? As the other features you mentioned are already there.

Serious question though, has any other company matched their 4o model yet? Maybe Claude?

Except when you ask it how it works

Because it keeps getting updates?

they also give a keyboard for that extra screen size

Well, there is a separate system for pirating prevention, the Google Play license check. That has existed for years.

Honestly, I’m shocked there aren’t way more. We have the Google Store, Samsung Store, Amazon store and…that’s it?

There are plenty of repositories for F-Droid, and from what I’ve heard, also for Aptoide.

That said, it is not really beneficial for most companies to compete with Google Play since they know the user base will be smaller, user experience will be worse (install warnings, no auto-update), and people may get affected by malware if they don’t pay attention to where they are downloading things from (may download a scam app directly instead of the legit app store).

It would be nice if a competitor entered the space where usability is the goal and be an open source solution.

ReactOS?

For other Chromium browsers or those who don’t see this yet, enable chrome://flags#extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-warning.

Search engine crawlers identify themselves (user agents), so they can be prevented by both honor-based system (robots.txt) and active blocking (error 403 or similar) when attempted.

Vivaldi and Brave have the option to disable the Hangouts extension in settings, which should disable this.

As linked in the article, it is indeed used for “Hangouts” (Meet) troubleshooting.

Some Chromium browsers like Brave and Vivaldi already announced they’ll extend it for as long as they can, and when they no longer can’t, they’ll think of something else like improve their own blockers.

With manifest v2, extensions could block the content however they wanted, reading and modifying DOM as they see fit.

Google claims that it is a security risk, so with manifest v3, extensions can only create and give the browser rules and the browser itself will block content based on them. The rules have a limit in size and capabilities.

If that was still not clear, try thinking of unrestricted SQL access vs a UI for modifying a database.

Floating?

tabs themselves ought to be part of the window decoration, not the app

Well, Windows did try that. It sounds cool as an idea, but it also severely limits what the tabs can do, as most programs don’t need tabs that are as advanced as browsers’, and even browsers’ implementations of tabs vary widely.

Well, by that logic the parents can do whatever they want with the phone, yes, including stopping cellular service or resetting it entirely. But the OS would still protect the teenager’s data from unauthorized access.