Google’s sales pitch for Manifest V3 is that, by limiting extensions, the browser can be lighter on resources, and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers.
Emphases mine. Funny, I use extensions to protect my privacy from Google.
Chromium needs to be fully divested from Google. End of story. There’s too much conflict of interest in letting the world’s largest advertising company have this much control over one of the two major browsers. If you don’t see the problem with that, imagine if Taco Bell was also the world’s largest producer of anti-diarrhea medicine.
As a web developer, Safari needs to either die in a fire or be transferred to a company that actually cares. It’s more than half a decade behind everybody else.
It also took 6 years longer than everybody else to support WebGL2, and it’s the only browser without a working WebGPU implementation. It also has no timeline for wasm-gc, while Chrome already ships with it default enabled and Firefox will ship with it on the next release.
Apple has been removing support for garbage collection from other technologies that used to support it. Wouldn’t be surprised if they never add support for that, they’ll tell you not to waste CPU cycles (and therefore, battery power) collecting garbage.
They want you to figure out when memory should be deallocated at compile time, not run time.
… Safari added support for HTML5 video in 2009. Chrome did not even exist yet in 2009.
In fact, Safari was the first to support it. At the time you had to use Flash to deliver video in every other browser.
Firefox added a half assed implementation of the video tag shortly after Safari but it wasn’t fully supported until 2013 according to caniuse.com. In fact FireFox was the last browser to fully support HTML5 video.
Not looking to start a flame war here, but if that’s the case, then Apple’s had even longer to get it right. lol. I implemented my video containers using the MDN specs which worked for both FF and Chrom(e/ium) as-is. Had to read through Apple-specific specs to figure out why Safari wouldn’t render them (not autoplay but render at all).
While it’s not quite “IE all over again”, it’s in the ballpark where I have to make special concessions to support a specific browser that is only offered on one company’s platform. History may not be repeating, but it’s certainly rhyming.
Ah - that’s got nothing to do with supported features. Apple has always been a major backer of web based video distribution - a lot of the tech (from video formats to delivery platforms like HTTP Live Streaming to the tag were partially or even fully invented by Apple.
Your video wasn’t working because the by default Safari assumes (correctly) that most video on the web is an ad. Safari generally only tolerates text/image ads* and to get video to work, you need to make it clear to Safari that the video is a real video the user wants to see.
Safari also silently blocks something like 99% of cookies… only cookies that behave like login/session/etc cookies are allowed. That’s a lot more problematic than blocking video… since there’s often just no way around it.
(* even text/image ads are barely tolerated… as far as I know, Safari is the only major browser that includes explicit support for ad blockers - Chrome/FireFox/etc allow extensions to arbitrarily manipulate the page, but safari actually has an ad blocking API - though they call it “content blocking”).
Yeah, when testing my sites, on the desktop at least, I don’t even bother testing in Safari. It ends up with nothing but headaches and a bunch of kludges to make things work there. Reminds me of working with IE years ago. But at least with desktop Safari, it has such a small market share that ignoring it isn’t problematic.
Adguard and pihole rely on DNS redirects - googs has already implemented “secure DNS” for Chrome in Android, which circumvents network level/local DNS by connecting to a Google owned DNS, serving content using those listings instead.
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
Yes, one should use Firefox. Yes that could also avoid the android problem, but also no, because Google forces chrome at weird times (eg, some apps will load a minimal web viewer for hyperlinks links, without leaving the app - sometimes apps don’t respect the default browser setting and instead just use chrome.
Adguard and pihole rely on DNS redirects - googs has already implemented “secure DNS” for Chrome in Android, which circumvents network level/local DNS by connecting to a Google owned DNS, serving content using those listings instead.
You can chose many different neutral DNS in AdGuard/Pihole and also in Android (quad9, for instance). In Android I use my own AdGuard Home instance as my DoT server.
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
Inbuilt AdBlockers work well and wont’ be affected by MV3, as they are not extensions. Don’t spread FUD.
Yes, one should use Firefox.
No need to be so masochistic and I wouldn’t use it regardlessly. I don’t want to give undeserved market share to corrupt Mozilla Corp. I’d rather watch ads. But, as I said, there’s no need for that, because between DNS blocker and inbuilt adblockers of better browsers, I haven’t seen a single fucking ad in ages.
They believe that Mozilla taking Google’s money is bad. But they think Brave surreptitiously changing urls to affiliate links and selling user data to ai bros is totally peachy.
Really, as with anyone who knows about Brave’s tomfoolery but accepts it with open arms, he just seems to be a supporter of their CEO, Brendan Eich, who’s a Silicon Valley douche and bigot. This seems to be supported by the particular animosity shown toward Mozilla, from where Eich was unceremoniously expelled from (due to the wave of negative PR that resulted form his being named their CEO) just before starting Brave.
Guy’s a fanboy. And one that has no problem. Throwing slurs around when discussing things like software. It’s best to just ignore him.
I switched to Vivaldi a couple months ago, and previously used brave in the past before growing to dislike it. It surprises me how many brave-heads ignore Vivaldi's existence. It's just a better Brave. No crypto BS and lots of poweruser features.
They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.
That’s not how that works. Other chromium browsers get to decide what source code they pull into thier own project. They can totally continue using regular DNS.
What are we doing differently in Firefox? WebRequest
One of the most controversial changes of Chrome’s MV3 approach is the removal of blocking WebRequest, which provides a level of power and flexibility that is critical to enabling advanced privacy and content blocking features. Unfortunately, that power has also been used to harm users in a variety of ways. Chrome’s solution in MV3 was to define a more narrowly scoped API (declarativeNetRequest) as a replacement. However, this will limit the capabilities of certain types of privacy extensions without adequate replacement.
Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest. We will continue to work with content blockers and other key consumers of this API to identify current and future alternatives where appropriate. Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we are committed to ensuring that Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.
I’m pretty sure ad experience will move some masses, I liked Chrome because Ublock works fine there, it has great extensions support and the best compatibility with the websites, but if you remove the adblocker support I would have moved (if I hadn’t already) in a heartbeat
Firefox is my daily, but the fact I have to fire up a chromium browser to use web serial or midi is an endless annoyance. Mozilla won’t add that functionality as they see it as a security risk.
Honestly, in my opinion it kind of is (though I’m not an expert on it). Except for convenience I don’t think a browser should be allowed to access my USB devices. Though I would welcome it if it was enabled with the same kind of request that pops up when a browser wants to access the microphone or camera.
That is, quite literally, how it works in Chromium. Mozilla still sees it as a security risk, even with user permissions. Honestly, having to boot Chromium is a bigger security risk.
For a while I was a bit confused, because Mozilla said they would also implement V3 Manifest …
by implementing Manifest V3 on its own terms, Mozilla saves developers who are switching to the new platform from having to support two different versions of their extensions (for Google Chrome and Firefox) at the same time. On the other hand, it allows content-blocking extensions that were originally built using the less restrictive Manifest V2 to continue working at full tilt.
Google can go fuck themselves for this. The moment their stupid Manifest v3 bullshit came to light, I quickly migrated to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
Firefox is probably the oldest browser in existence. The only surviving one among the original three (Netscape Navigator). The fact that it’s still among the major two is impressive by itself.
I mean, yeah. They absolutely don't want to be spending bandwidth on those of us who use adblockers. What I don't think a lot of people realize is that Google is perfectly happy with the people who are essentially never served an ad not using the service anymore. Saves them money.
Everything you said is correct. But the infuriating part is that YouTube reached that position by killing off its competition. YouTube wouldn’t be the only one standing now if they had shown the same behavior 10 years ago. Even more infuriating is that there are a lot of people around who support this entitlement from Google - because you know, you’re stealing from the creators! All creators should find a way to accept donations without feeding the abusive corporation.
I tried using Invidious, but found that it misses quite a lot of new posts in my subscriptions. So in the end I ahemflew to Ukraine to take advantage of family Premium for around £3 a month.
Because honestly, I have no real problem paying for Premium, but I massively object to paying £20 A MONTH to watch (mostly) amateur content that YouTube aren’t actually paying anyone to commission. How is Disney+ almost half the damn cost of a YT Premium family plan? Because Google are money-grubbing cunts, that’s how.
Mine has been working fine, but the instance did lose all my “Mark as watched” videos, and for some reason one specific channel never makes into the Subscriptions panel, but I just have it as a favourite and it ends up almost the same. The instance I was using for Piped is now borked, so I’m hanging onto Invidious for now.
You would think, but the number of people I've met who surf the web without any adblockers at all and just seem fine with it is alarming. I think Google is counting on a lot of people just not knowing any better.
Won't stop me from informing them otherwise though.
they already know they have the numbers allowing them not to care.... 'acceptable losses'. its not like they didnt already analyze this decision to death
Funnily enough I think the percentage use of adblockers is going to go up a fair bit thanks to what Google is doing. My amazingly sweet "just go along with anything" MIL actually complained to me about YouTube ads the other day, then ads on websites in general. She jumped at my offer to install a different YouTube client and a good adblocker once I explained that it was a possibility for her tablet.
If they wanted to pull this off they needed to do it quietly, not draw attention to the fact that adblockers exist and are apparently so effective they need to do something very public about them.
Doesn’t really matter at this point, I have already uninstalled chrome on all devices at home and work. I guess Google can still try to slow down other browsers on YouTube and other Google services though.
Trust me when I say this - they will keep pushing until their services are no longer usable at all on anything other than chrome. And they will find enough money to keep the antitrust regulators quiet. Meanwhile a big chunk of those who switched away from chrome will return to it - because principles are not bigger than convenience. Meanwhile, those with enough constitution to stay put will find themselves excluded from a large part of the web - a digital pariah, if you will.
Yeah I don’t doubt at all that Google will try. I’m a bit more optimistic than you that we will continue to have ways to get around their bullshit though.
I really really want their bullshit to be defeated and freedom to prevail. What I described towards the end is partially my experience. But it’s not a complete loss yet. I’m trying to get everyone off chrome, and more people seem to be listening this time.
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