back
201 comments
Good to hear the reaffirmation from Mozilla that the blocking WebRequest API would be retained. A little over three years ago, Mozilla had promised that it wouldn’t just blindly follow Google on Manifest v3 to the letter. [1]

Considering that uBlock Origin works best and can do the most in Firefox with this continuing support, I’m glad Mozilla is still walking the talk on this one.

We need at least one browser that makes the web usable, and that might as well be Firefox with uBlock Origin.

Edit: Oops. Missed providing the link reference below earlier.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/09/03/mozillas-manifest...

I really need to learn the Firefox debugger. My years of chrome debugger muscle memory has tied me to that product (at least for work which is 95% of my desktop browsing)

Personally I’m a mobile personal browser person which is safari. I can’t stand to be at a computer after a day of being at the computer.

"Usable" is an overstatement, but we at least gotta fight the fight.
Seeing this in this context just made me realize that it's weird to consider them "blockers", a loaded term. As if we're starting from some default, correct state, and then blocking part of it. We've always been able to choose what content we navigate to. These are content selectors/choosers, which just support our existing ability to choose what content we request and actions we take.
I disagree completely, "blockers" is accurate.

The user chooses what website page to visit, but it's the website that chooses want content gets served at any of its URLs. That's how the web works. Hence, when websites choose to include aspects of the page users don't want: "blockers", to block some of the page. Nothing loaded about the term it's just descriptive.

Nor are they "content selectors/choosers", nobody uses their adblocking plugin to find content, only to block parts of content they've found by visiting a website.

Ideologically, I am inclined to agree. I have an epidermic reaction to advertising in general. However, these extensions exist in a context where they depend on the majority of users not using them. If every browser had them, the economy of the web would change completely. Very few users who take active steps against ads want to pull a Stallman and relinquish entire parts of the Internet altogether; they want to see the content they are seeing, content that is most of the time supported by ads, without ads. The word 'blocker' is thus appropriate because the explicit goal is an asymmetric relationship based on other people making ads profitable.

In reality, the more interesting question would be whether we shouldn't limit our media consumption to begin with, or form a culture that is less dependent on advertising. If browsing with ads becomes mandatory some day, I will probably make the choice to severely cut the amount of Internet I gorge on. It will take some willpower, but every time I switch off the blocker and see what websites really are like I want to gag, so I won't be that difficult.

I’m fine with “content blockers”. They block content the same way my eyelids and eye muscles do when I decide to not look at billboards.

If you don’t have moral qualms with using your eyelids to block ads then you shouldn’t have with software content blockers either. It just outsources the act of blocking from your eyes into the computer.

the "block" ads.

Not everything needs to be analyzed to death for some sort of symbolism.

I call them HTML firewalls.
Bouncers?
I switched back to Firefox a while ago, and love it. I keep trying to think of how it could be kept afloat once Google stops funding it.

IIRC they get $400 million annually. There are 200 million FF users. $2 each wouldn't be bad... But realistically only 1% of the users would donate and $200 is unpalatable.

Maybe another organization picks it up and runs it more efficiently or at a loss for advertising?

Or...?

I don't really understand how a web browser needs 400m a year, that's a lot of employees
Do they really need 400m?
One serious criticism of Mozilla is the fact that a major chunk of that money goes into the CEO's pockets and doesn't get spent on Firefox.

That single fact makes me reluctant to pay for Firefox. Unless I'm sure that all the money I donate goes to the right cause and not to a CEO's bank.

> But realistically only 1% of the users would donate and $200 is unpalatable.

I'd pay $200/yr for the privacy and control benefits of Firefox over google-controlled Chrome.

The big test is not now, when Chromium discontinues content blockers, but when renewal of the contract with Google is up. For Google there is a big incentive in getting rid of ad blockers, and they have a lot of power over Mozilla being the party that is responsible for most of Mozilla's revenue.
Google keeps Mozilla propped up to avoid anti-trust.
This is one thing that has the potential to cause significant numbers of people to switch from Chrome to Firefox. The modern web is unusable without a good ad blocker and its inexplicable to me that it isn't a built-in feature enabled by default in every browser like pop-up blocking. You shouldn't have to install extensions just to get essential functionality from your browser.
The problem is that Google has a conflict of interest as both a browser developer and a platform for people to sell you ads. People selling ads to Google must be putting pressure on them to do this... Or maybe they have internal pressure to maximize revenues.

At the end of the day, yeah, it seems like it might cause people to switch. I'm also honestly wondering, how long until a real competitor to YouTube surfaces? I realize that this is hard to build (though we do have multiple streaming platforms in existence), but Google has been playing this slowly boiling frog experiment with ads on YouTube. Now you have multiple ads per video, coupled with ads baked within the videos themselves, and sponsored content. If you don't pay for YT premium, it's kind of unusable.

The worse the product gets, the more of an opening is created for the competition. Seems like a matter of when rather than a matter of if? What if Amazon or Apple created a YT alternative that was ad-free, maybe with some paid content to sponsor creators (pay $2 a month to get bonus content from this channel). They could afford to sink money into it and it could be very disruptive, but it's like they don't dare. Maybe they're afraid to associate their name with a product that could fail, kind of like Google Plus.

Suddenly Firefox is interesting and Chrome is not. We need to stop thinking of people as users and start thinking them computer owners. Users work when you are sharing a computer, but for installed software, we should think owner instead.
"These weeks in Firefox: issue 124" was referenced in the post, but was not linked.

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2022/09/21/these-weeks-in-f...

as a person whohas exclusively used firefox all my life, even on my android, i have both firefox and focus, this is quite good news.

the only problem i can imagine is the invisible pressure by the unending desire to become chrome,you know with hiding the search bar by default "because people are used to that from chrome" and other shenanigans, i feel this support might be shortlived because the stupid people managing firefox are paid by google to fuck up firefox in the worst possible way and this just feels another attempt in that regard.

btw, i've been online since 2004, daily so i have used a lot of firefox

I was saddened recently when I learnt they changed "View image" to "Open image in new tab". I loved the way "View image" worked, allowing you to maintain the image in full view while preserving tab history. If you wanted to open it a new tab, you could middle click it or ctrl click it. But since users were used to the Chrome behaviour they changed it to match, and thus Firefox lost a functionality. Unfortunately, since this is such a niche use case, Mozilla has little incentive to restore it. (Note: Extensions that restore the context menu item fails when the image loading relies on the REFERER header, since it actively re-requests it.)

There are numerous smaller items like this, that just flowed a lot better, particularly if you're heavily browsing images, like tab previews, that have been sacrificed either in the name of performance or to be more like Chrome. Fortunately, SeaMonkey still maintains these classic features, but is unfortunately a memory hog.

My daily browser has also been Firefox since around 2004. SeaMonkey remains a time pocket, when I long for the old days of yore.

I think along the same lines. Mozilla has forgotten a lot of the political fights of the past around freedom and customisation and instead focused on US partisan talking points supporting censorship and forgetting about the desires of core users.

I, too, feel that eventually they might just go: "Everyone is doing it and it cost us more effort to keep maintaining it, here you have our own internal blocking, which won't block Google related stuff because they fund us"

All I know is. It's my device. Not Google's and I intend to fight that battle, just like we did with Microsoft.

I doubt it, since this is an API, and not a visible difference. Seems that changes like that are mostly targeted at the UI.
I see that differently… my wife uses firefox and that API. She eventually replaced her laptop. The only problem was that the old one wasn't fast enough to process about 90,000 regexps each time she clicked a link.

Chrome replaced it with a less flexible API that has bounded runtime, preventing the browser from the kind of slowness that caused a certain dissatisfaction, even disharmony here.

You could say that people shouldn't configure so much adblocking that the browser has to evaluate 90,000 regexps for a simple click. Or you could say that the browser shouldn't prevent that case by design. It's not simple. IMO a worst case like this is one of the causes of "invisible pressure".

I'm feeling nostalgic for the times where monopolies were broken up ...
Good, that's why I use Firefox. Still can't help but find it strange that ads are called "content" now.
Ads aren't considered content, uBO is called a content blocker because it can block all kinds of DOM content and not just ads.
Pihole blocks ads for an entire network, so why does a content blocker have to be built into the browser? Can't it just be a separate app you run, outside the browser? Even if the browser is using HTTPS the URL and IP address for everything not from the site you are on is visible. The app could even run as a fake proxy. Scripts would be harder to block if they are sent encrypted, but since you can view the scripts in a browser and hence know the exact content of the script maybe it would be easy to snip them out of the encrypted stream by automatically generating signatures or formulas for what to snip for the scripts from various sites. You could even use an embedded browser in the app to decode and format the entire page, automatically determine what to snip, do the snip, and then forward the modified stream to the users primary web browser (with some delay). Any checksums could be modified appropriately. The app could present a GUI in the primary browser that the user could use to decide what to block. Are the page contents protected by a cryptographic signature? Does not seem like it would matter since the embedded browser certainly has the ability to decrypt everything. Data in the reverse direction could be sent unmodified. Maybe the slowdown caused by filtering everything this way would be unacceptable to users? Some users might find it acceptable in exchange for greater control.
A blocker like uBlock Origin does much more than DNS level blocking. There are many cases where that isn't enough.
I read somewhere that even though Mozilla will continue supporting the ad blocking API from manifest v2, the rest of manifest v2 will be completely dropped so most of the extensions that I use like greasemonkey will stop working. Is that true?
There's a migration guide here: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest...

Since they aren't taking away the onBeforeRequest() functionality, I don't see a good reason why greasemonkey can't be ported over.

Googling "tampermonkey manifest v3" lead me to this issue, which has a lot of relevant discussion: https://github.com/Tampermonkey/tampermonkey/issues/644
No.
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: indicate that DNS is locally overridden by entries in /etc/hosts

- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: Browser UI: indicate that a domain does not have DNSSEC record signatures

- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBT: Browser UI: indicate whether DNS is over classic UDP or DoH, DoT, DoQ (DNS-over-QUIC)

- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: browser: indicate that a page is modified by extensions; show a "tamper bit"

- [ ] ENH,SEC: Devtools?: indicate whether there are (matching) HTTP SRI Subresource Integrity signatures for any or some of the page assets

- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: a "DNS Domain(s) Information" modal_tab/panel like the Certificate Information panel

Two easy ways to block trackers and ads... without a firewall.

Adding blockers to the hosts table still works with Chrome... hope they don't muck with that...

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

But if they do... there are always DNS solutions you can add to your Router.

https://nextdns.io/

I use Firefox, but even things like Windows spams ads at you if you let it. So many things have Google trackers built in too...

You can't use DNS/hosts to block ads on sites like YouTube because they use the same domain to load ads and videos. To block the ads you have to block the video itself.

So while still useful, that's not really a replacement for browser extensions.

This comment reminds me of the crazy spammer who used to frequent Slashdot, always with a long comment about how to use hosts file and how it is superior to every other method of blocking content.
The maintainer of uBlock Origin posted a detailed comment about converting from v2 to v3 here:

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

It’s really worth a read to better understand the pros and cons of this new API.

Random note, but I missed the slimmer tabs from Vivaldi and Brave and the older Firefox themes.

This works, its just hidden. Says unsupported but works fine in Nightly even so far.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...

Good. On Windows atleast Firefox is just as fast as Chrome. Even for heavy sites like Twitch/Youtube. Ublock origin works the best, vertical tabs from extensions etc so I dont really miss any features. Maybe the Vivaldi F2 command line.

Edge is still faster but its good that the default Windows browser is finally good.

why can't ublock origin work properly with this manifest v3?
Yeah I mean, they have to. It's open source software so it could be forked otherwise and also, if they abandoned this core principle anyway, they would lose their entire user base in droves.

There would be no faster way to nuke the entire product. Which is a good thing.

It should content block itself.
How long until Google’s campaign that Firefox is an illegitimate browser
i know that we're all sure that even if mozilla reverses this decision, we'll have good forks... but, we neeed to be sure to have them on our side... open internet needs people like mozilla
The fact that they're even spelling this out means it's going to be reversed soonish. Fortunately Firefox (or at least the original iisdea of a lightweight free-as-in-freedom browser) is ready for another fork.
Is Mozilla really trying to juxtapose themselves here against another browser that removes support for power user customization like they don't do it? That's wild. Is there no one left at Moz that remembers them throwing away the entire ecosystem of XUL based extensions that allowed for many things that current Firefox builds don't re: blocking and UI customization.

Mozilla literally did this back in the version 37 and only Firefox forks remain to support the full set of extension features. I guess we're all amnesiacs or the pot is just being boiled slowly enough to not notice.