leopold , 13 days ago to linux in will ad-blockers in chromium follow suit when chrome discontinues them?

MV3 doesn’t make adblockers impossible, only less effective. It’s important to note that MV3 has changed a fair bit since the initial controversy and isn’t quite as limiting as it used to be. The fact that adblockers will lose some functionality at all is still a dealbreaker for me and many others which I thankfully won’t have to deal with as a Firefox user, but it isn’t going to kill adblockers on Chrome and most users will probably just install an MV3-compatible adblocker and move on with their day.

uBlock Origin’s developers don’t seem to want to make a proper MV3 port, which is fair because they’d probably have to rewrite most of the extension, but they did create the far more minimal uBlock Orgin Lite, which a lot of people have taken to be an attempt at porting uBlock Origin to MV3. It isn’t that. On top of MV3’s limitations, it also makes the decision to work within these self-imposed restrictions:

• No broad host permissions at install time – extended permissions are granted explicitly by the user on a per-site basis.
• Entirely declarative for reliability and CPU/memory efficiency.

These aren’t MV3 limitations, just a thing Gorhill decided to do. See the FAQ. You can get much closer to uBlock Origin within MV3’s constraints than uBlock Origin Lite does. Right now, the best option appears to be AdGuard, which has been making a true best-effort attempt at porting their adblocker to MV3 pretty much since the announcement.

BakedCatboy , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to technology in Chrome’s Manifest V3, and its changes for ad blocking, are coming real soon

Edit: of course the below only applies to chrome and possibly chrome derivatives - FF is keeping MV2

It’ll make it a lot more likely that YouTube ads will get through because MV3 limits the block list size to a fraction of the size normally used by uBO and also disallows external/live updates to the block list, instead forcing the rules to be baked into the extension. Meaning an update to the blocking rules could take a week of extension review time to go through. I heard that the YouTube ad blocking rules can update multiple times a day so this would easily allow Google to update their ad code before approving updates to ad blockers, allowing them to always stay ahead.

So it might not outright break it, but some rules will have to be left off so it seems like it’ll be a dice roll if you get an ad where the blocking rule had to be left off to fit Google’s block list limit or the rule you have is stale because it took a couple weeks for the extension update to be approved on the extension store.

The feature of MV3 that enables these changes is that in MV3, the extension is handing over the complete blocklist to chrome, which does the blocking and gets to put limits on the blocklist. In MV2, the extension is given a direct hook to do the blocking itself, so it can have an unlimited block list size and can source the blocklist from anywhere. Think of it kind of like the difference between letting a graduation speaker speak off the cuff vs the school reviewing the speech beforehand and having their finger on the mic switch in case you wander off script. So the new system technically can be more secure and performant because the blocklist is reviewed as part of the extension and because poorly written blocker code can’t slow you down (only Google’s optimized logic is allowed to run) but it only works if they don’t impose limits lower than what effective ad blockers need (ie updating frequently like daily and allowing a large blocklist). Plus uBo is written really well for resource usage so it’s getting crippled even though it’s a shining example of an effective ad blocker.

Plus there are even more limitations like certain types of advanced rules that all I understand is just needed for certain sites that are tricky., but those rules aren’t supported in MV3. The uBo GitHub wiki has some information about this: github.com/…/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)#fil…#filtering-capabilities-which-cant-be-ported-to-mv3)

fine_sandy_bottom , 1 month ago to technology in uBlock Origin developer recommends switching to Firefox as Chrome flags the extension

I hadn’t heard of this.

The FAQ says it’s not a 1 for 1 replacement. There’s a lot of features which can’t be ported.

It’s probably better than nothing for most people, but not as good as uBO was.

Still, I wonder why it’s not mentioned more often.

Phoenix3875 , 1 month ago to technology in Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled

From my understanding, MV3 kills vital features of ad-blockers in that

1. Some filtering rules do rely on the ability to read the content of the webpage, which can’t be migrated, per the FAQ linked in the article
2. The declarative API means an update to the rules requires an update to the plugin itself, which might get delayed by the reviewing process, causing the blocker to lag behind the tracker. It might not be able to recover as quickly as uBO in the recent YouTube catch-up round.

lemmyvore , 2 months ago to technology in Google Chrome's Death Of Manifest V2 Has Arrived

And if you want to know exactly what will stop being possible with V3:

github.com/…/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)#fil…#filtering-capabilities-which-cant-be-ported-to-mv3)

lemmyvore , 3 months ago to technology in Google Chrome change that weakens ad blockers begins June 3rd

github.com/…/Frequently-asked-questions-(FAQ)#fil…#filtering-capabilities-which-cant-be-ported-to-mv3)

ReversalHatchery , 9 months ago to technology in Here's what's happening to ad blockers in Google Chrome

I did say the element zapper was missing.

I didn’t mention the zapper. Though I agree that is a great tool, along with the picker which is then probably also gone.

uBO Lite is using the same default filterlists as uBO

Uses the same defaults, which are only updated after a new release gets through google’s addon review process, in an environment where often quick changes are needed for the addon to work effectively. Its much easier to get thorugh a firewall that is only updated once every few or even more days, than one that automatically obtains the updates every half a day.

What about the lists that are not enabled by default, and custom lists added by the user? As I understand, they are not a thing anymore.

Did I understand it right that that according to this and this FAQ entry, neither of the lists have site specific rules, as it is not possible to have them anymore?