this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
102 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
59390 readers
2896 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are a few more layers to this problem that no one seems to acknowledge.
What if someone DID come out of the woods and provided a Chromium fork that put Mv2 support back in. Then what? How do you install those extensions? Google won't be allowing Mv2 extensions in their store anymore. Supposedly you'd need to download it directly from the developer and install it manually. That's not great UX.
Maybe if the dev community came up with an alternative web store implementation that allowed Mv2 extensions, but that comes with a lot of other problems, to name a few: dev effort, costs for hosting the web app for the store and hosting the extensions themselves (which wouldn't necessarily be expensive, but wouldn't be free either), approval workflows for the extensions, etc. Thing is, though, all of that would require from devs a clear roadmap and a level of coordination that from my seat here, I don't see a hint of it happening.
All of the above: either having a Chromium fork that allows installing Mv2 extensions manually, or implementing an alternative web store, is not a trivial effort, and then how many people will actually benefit from it? Those really concerned with effective adblocking, like us, are a tiny minority of the user base. Would the effort of maintaining a Chromium fork and/or a free(dom) webstore be worth it if very few people will actually use it?
I hate to say it, but yeah, Mv2 is doomed. I didn't want to go back to Firefox, but I guess I'll have to.
Maybe have the fork allow installing .xpi formats and freeload off the Firefox store? Since Firefox’s extension API is basically the same extension API but with the chrome namespace renamed to browser, it shouldn’t be that big of a hassle if someone was willing to do it
Why don’t you want to go back to Firefox? If you hate Mozilla just use a fork like Waterfox
My gripe is Mozilla not implementing PWA''s (for reasons I have no idea), and then the whole thing with privacy pass (because they're too afraid of centralization of any kind despite being a multi-million dollar non-profit).
I seriously do hate that Firefox is going to be my only option on a couple of months for ad blocking. Because I strongly doubt it's going to get any better between now and June given the rate that Mozilla develops that and how little they listen to their userbase.
As for all the forks out there, they usually don't have a mobile equivalent to go with them so they're only half decent to me.
The reason was that it didn't have enough users and it costed resources to maintain and develop (despite Mozilla's- how many developers?- that needlessly removed GTK theming support from their apps). Personally I don't like web apps due to their memory footprint, so for the only times I use them, I just search it up.
It isn't. uBO Lite and Adguard are already enough to block most ads since Google increased the adlist-without-extension-update-limits a bunch of times.
Waterfox recently launched their Android version
you can sync Firefox forks