Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did
theverge.com111 points by eternalreturn 6 hours ago
111 points by eternalreturn 6 hours ago
This is ultimately the endpoint of all Chromium-based browsers. Even the most stalwart will throw in the towel on MV2 support sooner or later, because the effort required to maintain non-trivial patches against mainline becomes too great for the team to keep up with.
It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.
This has been obvious to who knows that the key feature to the devs of these browsers is “-based.” None of the chromium-based browsers are anything other than UI tweaks and default extensions being included. None of them who rewrite significant parts of the browser engine, because that would be too much extra work.
The only projects which have a hope of maintaining MV2 compatibility are those who are a hard fork of an earlier version of chromium or a totally different engine.
> open source nature is something of a technicality
No, but maybe this highlights that it's never accurate to conflate "open source" or "free (as in speech) software" with end-users having power over the people providing resources to the project.
I keep telling that folks shipping Chrome forks and Electron junk have helped Google turn the Web into ChromeOS Platform.
And then they complain about Safari.
Had it been today, and Google would have no issue pushing for PNaCL.
That's kinda true with every open source software. As soon as some branch has a sizable chunk of developers, forks are discouraged, because either you need to keep up or give up eventually. That's what makes torvalds/linux special and why people want to upstream. If the upstream doesn't accept: oh well.
I don't think this is the case.
Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.
I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.
Maybe things have stabilized a bit?
I worked on multiple projects modifying Chromium and V8 a decade ago, and the GP matches my experience exactly. Absolute mountains of dev time just tracking the latest release and what we wanted to do wasn’t limited to one module or subsystem.
Fortunately all you need is one clanker to maintain the patches. What used to be immensely expensive human work (and tedious!), is now just ”claude please re-enable manifest v2 and rebuild an installer”
Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the ad blocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the built-in ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.
If this thread is indicative of the sort of browser discourse in <current year> it's no wonder Google won.
Nerds used to know how to computer, is what i'm saying.
I never stopped using Firefox.
It always feels weird to see so much more complaining about Firefox than Chrome and Edge, while it's still so very much far ahead in terms of respecting user choices. All AI features can easily be turned off (and I am assuming those respect user privacy better than the ones of Chrome/Edge). When you say no to Firefox, it remembers it. Chrome keeps asking me every few days / weeks to become the default browser.
If we lose Firefox the web is going to be a worse place to be in.
All the software freedom people here will do everything except use Firefox.
Welp, the biggest reason that I use Edge just got thrown out, time to switch to Firefox.
Until 2023, Edge was sending every URL you visited to bingapis.com.
Microsoft's current privacy statement also says "Depending on your settings, this browsing history is sent to Microsoft"
That seems to be true to every major application release by MS. No, the OS is of course secure, pinky promise!
The telemetry and ads (on start page) didn't bother you? I'm surprised there's seemingly a contingent of people who are too lazy to install any other chrome fork (eg. Brave), but are motivated enough to up sticks and switch to firefox the moment ublock is removed.
At least that's something I can just rant about a couple of times a year, and enjoy tracker blocking the rest of the time.
For what it's worth, I daily drive Edge on my Windows machine and it's an okay browser, haven't had a reason to install Chrome in ages (though did run Firefox for a while due to liking their dev tools better, it's still on my MacBook cause I like the UI more than Safari).
Even when my Intel Arc B580 has its drivers freeze the browser, I can just kill the GPU rendering process and it picks back up with no data loss, whereas with Firefox I had to restart the whole thing. Seems related to video decode, changing ANGLE backends or whatever in the browsers didn't really help and disabling hardware acceleration makes the experience suck more than it otherwise should.
If not for that, I'd still probably be on Firefox fully, despite Mozilla not exactly being the most sane of companies, though maybe trying to fund developing a browser and a whole org is a bit crazy as it is.
Brave was okay but nothing special. Maybe I should look at Vivaldi again, but it's an odd position to be in, when upstream is pushing changes on you, so it probably doesn't matter what they do or don't want to support long term, same as with every other Chromium derived browser.
Bummer about Chromium fucking over people who dislike ads.
uBO 1.7.3 was released just 3 days ago, so it would be more accurate to say "better" rather than "older".
<surprised pikachu> time for everyone using Chromium-based crap xD
Advertising companies shouldn’t be in the browser business. It’s a really bad conflict of interest. Chromium is a mistake.
Firefox is pretty great. But IMO they have some poor ux defaults that make it unappealing to random people who simply want a browser.
Chromium being open source is not a mistake. Letting google be the sole driver and not forking it has been. People who want control over their browsers have options. It's a fight because most people don't care about these things.
There is no “browser business,” because people are - with rare exceptions - unwilling to pay for a web browser. Even Firefox is ad-supported indirectly via its default search contract with google.
There is a browser business when the browser company is also in the ad business.
Right. For example, Firefox Mobile doesn't support hitting ctrl+T to open a new tab, completely breaking flow for anyone on a tablet with a keyboard or their phone docked to a monitor.
I honestly don't know how people do without ad blockers. Even with being ok with ads, they are so overwhelming that I could not use internet without blocking them
I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.
It's still a security risk though: you still have to visit those sites to determine if they have ads or not. Why browse without proper protection?
So no youtube?
I find _yt-dlp_ to be the best ad-block solution for Youtube. One can watch it offline and archive it if value has been found.
Web Brower with ad-blocking setup can still have advertisements leak through. When it does and it still does after three refreshes, I just don't watch and move on.
I will always be a sunk-cost for Google.
YouTube is tolerable with ads. If I found it intolerable, I would pay. Or not visit.
Humans are just so damn different in their tolerance to wasting time. I can't take feeling like I wasted 10 seconds of my time on an ad even when watching an video for recreation.
If an ad isn't blocked, I fast forward through it. If I can't fast forward, I mute it. If I can't mute it, I'll mute my computer and change tabs for the duration. If it's a page in a magazine, I flip it quickly. If it's a billboard I'll avert my gaze. If it's in an airplane I take out my headphones and cover the screen.
I find being advertised to so annoying there's no way in hell I will spend my limited time on this planet willingly consuming an ad.
Yeah, why should I watch your content? If you want me to watch your crap, please pay me. Otherwise it's my time and attention, you expect to get for free.
If modern ads weren't built to be intentionally manipulative to the nth degree, whilst also extracting a huge amount of private data of the viewer, I might be more tolerant of them.
It's doubly crazy to me that someone would let a machine take their time like that. An inanimate object, and they give it any amount of respect instead of fixing it to do what they want.
'Rainbow Dome Musick', by Steve Hillagr..glorious soothing music, then 30 mins in, a Barilla pasta advert. Sorry, youtube - I tried.
YouTube premium is one of the best subs you can buy if you watch a lot of YouTube. Plus you get Music.
YT Music would be be better if I did not have to double check every of its suggestion for AI generation. Some accounts to make their AI use public which is nice but there's no way to see their channel info in YT Music to look for that.
You can actually tap on the channel name and scroll down to see the About section (at least on iOS).
I never had genAI tracks being suggested on YouTube Music. Though it might be a factor that my account predates genAI music.
I use the web version and when clicking an artist's name I only see a description for well-known ones. Other channels don't show any description even though the YouTube side has one.
I assume one requirement for getting genAI tracks is being initially fine with hearing music from random channels and also hearing music produced after 2022; if one only cares (for example) about pre-2020 very well-known music they're probably going to be safe.
I regularly listen to recent music, but often tracks I explicitly search for, and autoplay based on those I “liked”. My “Liked Music” playlist has several thousand entries, so I suspect that heavily steers what I’m presented with.
Cant say I've ever heard any AI generated music on YTM before
This probably depends on if you've used it enough to make some playlists and give it an idea of the real music that you like.
In case your assumption here is that TFA is about Edge disabling adblockers: it's not. It's just removing ManifestV2 support. ManifestV3 is still supported. Despite what one might assume, MV3 does not seem to measurably diminish the effectiveness of adblockers; if anything, it improves it. (Source: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0027.php)
The only reason anyone knows about the switch between manifest 2 and 3 is that the only meaningful difference is the crippled ad blocking ability. Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
Right, but there is no meaningful difference in terms of ad blocking ability.
It's all theoretical. In practice, uBlock Origin Lite works amazingly on MV3. In my experience, it blocks all the ads. And I've been using it for a while now.
I mean you’re right about the awareness of it due to ad blocking but
> Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
MV3 comes with a ton of security improvements over MV2, a side effect is the perceived weakening of ad blocking extensions but the benefits outweigh the cons.
MV2 effectively allowed a permanently open RCE pathway.
The browser itself should ideally be handling ad blocking as it’s more effective and efficient at it (Brave, Vanadium, Trivalent).
Safari has already been on an MV3-like extension system for years yet only Chromium draws ire. I mean they got flack at first but it died off and now there’s no real difference.
Isn't the main issue that for MV3 you can't have a dynamic blocklist ? And so you have to update it with an extension update ?
There is a dynamic API too that allows extensions to modify the blocklist at runtime.
I’ve been using UBlock Origin Lite on my iPhone for a while, and that works great, keeping itself updated from EasyList and allowing for custom rules.
In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.
>In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.
I don't how this is supposed to be a demerit given that the v2 version had full access to every site you visit. Safari just made that more explicit.
I use noscript instead of an ad blocker. I find it blocks the intrusive ads. I do not mind what I view as normal ads (ie: text or link), but these video and popup ads drive me crazy. I find noscript blocks the "bad" ads.
Vivaldi for the win.
Vivaldi is about to drop support for Manifest V2 as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/1urieed/com...
I'd been using it solely for GMail / Google Drive / etc. at work, for whatever improved compatibility a Chromium browser might provide over Firefox, which I use for everything else. I got the warning that UBlock Origin won't work, and I immediately ditched Vivaldi. I'm sad about it, I think Vivaldi otherwise is a good browser.
I love Vivaldi, but it also uses Chromium. If an extension is not in the Chrome Web store Vivaldi will not be able to install it.
Firefox seems to be the only reasonably mainstream option for proper ad blocking.
Vivaldi has ad blocking built into it, and has no issue with you enabling developer settings and sideloading extensions from a file you download from Github Releases.
who uses Edge anyway..
I wonder if this is from efforts to maintain the difference between upstream and Edge - such that Edge is trying to simplify development by following Chrome/Chromium closer.
Running Unbound on my gateway with a curated adblock list. Easy setup, network-wide ad blocking on every device / browser.
DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.
I'd rather have 100% of devices on my network have near 90% of all ads effectively ad blocked than deal with installing ad blockers on all possible clients. Sure, I use an ad blocker on my personal machine with firefox, but none of the phones besides mine does. None of the family that visits do. Barely any of my friends that come over do. None of the TVs and streaming devices and whatnot do. I am blocking more ads from ever reaching my network than the majority of people who only use browser based adblockers do.
I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.
>I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections?
No. See:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...
>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.
They can block, it just has to be declarative unlike before. It's better than DNS adblockers since you can still do content filtering, CSS/JS injections and whatnot.
Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.
Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.
>Don't know how anyone can use YT without it.
With an adblocker..
Why would you need yt premium with an adblocker?
The funniest part of this is that you're paying to still see 10% of the ads. I use Firefox and see 0% of the ads for free
I use a browser with a built-in blocker (Brave Origin) and I don't see ads in YouTube.
Droped Chromium browsers and been using Safari with Wipr2, so far the best experience
I guess it still will be the best browser to download Firefox
Lets hope it stays that way :)
But if offered enough $, I fear it will join that no-bocker bandwagon.
The link is paywalled and the site requires me a subscription to keep reading TFA. This happens even after using the link with the Wayback Machine.
I use MV3 AdGuard and it blocks ads for me. I don't get the fuss about MV2 deprecation.. sure, MV3 is limited compared to firefox, but it's not like MV2 was that much better, no version ever supported rewriting request response.
MV3 DNR redirect is notably lame though, instead of replacing the response it generates a real redirect which breaks for example replacing the service worker response. But could MV2 webRequestBlocking replace the response? Well of course not.
Rules are limited (in syntax and number) and you can only ship updated rules with updated extensions (at least you can skip the queue if you only update rulesets but it's VERY annoying to do). It's also missing a bunch of features: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... (I see here that replacing response body is possible with Firefox only, is that your use-case?). MV2 was miles better.
Besides AdGuard I also have my own extension that loads userscripts from my own server (that uses the new userScripts API), so I think I only see my own point of view and the things that would potentially limit my solutions.
So far I'm able to block everything I want, but I mentioned replacing the response body because this is the only way I could modify or even inspect the service worker.. I think this vector could help circumventing ad blockers, but again - it would only matter if there were ads I'd not be able to block.
When it comes to distribution, firefox sucks because I can't even run my own extensions there, my distro doesn't package firefox developer edition so signatures are required. In contrast, Chrome let's me load unpacked extensions without any problems.
> I don't get the fuss about MV2 deprecation
Just observe this thread. It's a tribal moment, an occasion for a consumer to reassure himself that he has the right philosophy, uses the right product and rightly hates these other things that deserve to be hated. The fellow believers can upvote each other and downvote any empirical observation which threatens the faith.
Why do browser vendors have such a control over browsers? Can anyone make a dll injection and bring back manifest v2 ?
People can create the world, but they do need a lot of time. A lot of money buys you time, so nobody 'poor' can keep up. That wouldn't be a problem for web UAs, if the standards wouldn't be 'improved' at the same path as well. It's kinda like proof of work, but for standard bodies and ownership of a system.
They have control over what they distribute. Chromium and Firefox are both open source and people can (and should) use derivatives they find acceptable.
Basically every chromium based browser.
Brave as well?
Brave's adblock isn't as powerful as ublock.
In what sense? As a normie-tier user of Brave’s internal and blocker, it’s worked great. I never became a power-user of uBlock.
Not saying this is it, but I never managed to block YouTube shorts with brave adblocker (in mobile), where I can do it with ublock. If you can do it, please explain, I promise I will try asap (I really dislike ff mobile UI).
On mobile (similar on Desktop), just go to Setting -> Shields and Privacy -> Content Filters.
In there are a bunch of Youtube related blockers (including Shorts), that I find work really well. Mobile Brave also lets you lock/screen off your phone while a YT video continues playing, which is a killer feature for listening to podcasts.
I found myself becoming addicted to YT Shorts, and Brave's filters totally solved my problem.
Brave said they’ll keep some select MV2 extensions, though that remains to be seen. Especially if it causes too much maintenance headache with upstream chromium. Also it seems that Brave now distributes these select MV2 extensions. So I’m not sure if they have forked them, or if they just repackage upstream.
I believe their adblock is built in to the browser and not an extension, so it can be more effective than the limited extensions.
Brave has its own downsides too, but at least the browser seems pretty effective at blocking ads and tracking junk.
[dead]
It's ending manifest V2, not just adblockers.
uBlock Origin lite is V3 and is still supported
Inferior alternative
Serious question: which sites have you encountered where ublock lite doesn't do the job? Even tricky sites (eg. youtube) are defeated with scriptlets, not by intercepting network responses.
I don’t have any data on that because chromium derivatives aren’t installed, haha. It’s not a matter of “does it work”. It’s philosophical.
I've used uBlock Origin Lite and have had no issues with blocking ads. The only downside I've seen is that I can't do "Block Elements" to hide non-ad annoying parts of sites.