Google Pushes Unpopular Chrome Update - What to do!
youtu.beMost people still haven’t heard of Manifest V3, so if you are one of those not using Firefox, this is for you.
If you’ve been on YouTube or Reddit August last year, you might’ve seen this screen yourself, or a screenshot of someone else getting it. This of course, I am talking about the infamous YouTube ad blocker blocker popup, discussion exploded on Reddit mostly consisting of people complaining about ads, as well as an angry mob storming r/memes, turning it into a Firefox propaganda centre.
About a month later, different adblockrs eventually found their way of bypassing detection, and they work on YouTube again. So natrually Redditors thought they’ve won another war against big tech, completely ignoring Google’s original plan to kill off adblockers by June this year.
So all extensions, including adblockers follows a specification called the Manifest V2. The Manifest allows extensions to do certain things, say accessing browser tabs or to change browser settings. All while putting some limitations, and prevent extensions from doing crazy stuff like installing a virus to your system. But too much limitation, is what pisses off many extension developers about the upcoming ManifestV3.
In this article written by the EFF, they interviewed developers responsible for popular extensions, where most described ManifestV3 as a downgrade, with some accused it for being purposefully bad. I particularly like this one from the creator of SingleFile, “I consider the migration to Manifest V3 to be a major regression from a functional and technical point of view.”
After an update in June this year, a feature called the WebRequest API will be removed, and the adblockers and tracker blockers that depend on this feature will stop working. Since the business model of Google is to track your online activity and then show you personalised ads, it is not difficult to see why this feature is removed.
Not only are they sacrifising user experience for monetary gain, they are forcing the same update on all Chromium browsers as well. I am hereby devastated to inform you that this is not the first time they have done it, and it will not be the last time they will do it.
But there are also good news, non-Chromium browsers will not be affected by the Manifest V3, and if you are already using one, you will be exempt from any future nonsense Google throws in your way. So if you are considering switching to one, unless Safari is your goto browser, which lacks competent extensions support, you can still get your adblockers, another adblockers, all the adblockers.
So are you going to make the switch before the update? Let me know in the comments down below, anyways I will be seeing you in two weeks, have a good one.
An article for more my ranting needs https://gmtex.siri.sh/fs/1/School/Y12/Cssoc/chromium.html
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It’s a good thing I’m a Firefox boy. I’m honestly fucking sick of companies making free money off me at my inconvenience while I get nothing in return.
But but… Aren’t you happy with the illusion of freedom and choice? Wouldn’t you be even happier buying stuff you don’t need? Trust me
Fuck no. I know this is sarcasm but still, fuck no.
Firefox shall rise soon.
I don’t care I use Internet Explorer
Which uses Chrimium as its core with slightly different window dressing on top.
You’re thinking of Edge, not Internet explorer
Since 2020, apparently…I didn’t know
Any idea what are the “forked degoogled chromium” branches going to do about this?
The can do a lot regarding the browser, but the flaw can be the dependency of the Chrome Store, controlled by Google. In Vivaldi most of the extensions in the Chrome Store are redundant, because of own inbuild features, also with a own e2ee sync service.
I use Brave
Then you are affected
I don’t use extensions, I use the builtin adblocker. I don’t think I am affected
Not yet…
One of the absolute worst choices in the Chromium browser world.
Brave has everything I need. Adblocker enabled by default. I don’t see ads, cookie pop ups and other annoying things. It’s the best browser I have ever used
Your browser has basic features? I’m impressed.
Already moved to Firefox on my phone. The only browser on mobile that I know of that supports extensions, giving me ad-free youtube and dark mode on websites ever since vanced was shut down.
someone rebooted the project as youtube revanced, someone was even kind enough to build all the apks and post them on github (idk if they are safe, but i use them anyways)
I have one word for you, my brother:
Revanced.
I personally enjoy connecting to Invidious via Clipious. On my Debian laptop, I use FreeTube for the same, although I think a web-hosted frontend for Invidious directly loads videos way faster.
I tried revanced for a while. It worked for a little and one day videos were suddenly buffering for 5 minutes at a time after around a minute of playing. I read online that it might have been yt measures against using a client like this (changing account or logging out didnt do anything. Browser played the videos fine)
Firefox with adblocker and the extension to be able to play in the background has been my savior. Works flawlessly.
It was, and it was after 30 seconds. You install the updated revanced, and turn on app version spoofing in the settings and no more buffer issue.
Thank you, that worked. At least for the last few days.
Every other month, YT update something that break Revanced.
So I just went to the Revanced app to see what’s the newest recommended version of YT to download and patch. Then a quick reinstall and everything is back to normal. Don’t even have to re-login.
Been doing that for over a year. Imo, the native app’s experience is always a thousand times better than the mobile web browser.
My phone uses a split APK which requires root using revanced, but my work profile blocks rooting ;_;
I could just download the APKs manually but a lot more effort than using Firefox ngl
Revanced doesn’t require root. You download the Revanced app from official site then open it and choose YouTube. It’ll tell you what’s the latest recommended version of YT to use. You download that exact version from APKpure. Use Revanced to patch the YT app (I just use default) and install. That’s it. No root.
Also it requires their new Revanced Gapps package if you want to login to YT (it’ll ask and point you to download link if you don’t have it)
Whats the difference between using Revanced or NewPipe?
No one is being forced to use Chrome.
Anyone using a work or school Chromebook is, actually.
Does it affect me if I use Firefox. ?
nO
That’s exactly the cure, not using Chrome
No
No
no
Ok. I tried Firefox for about a month on my Android phone and Mac, but unfortunately had to go back to Chrome on both. I don’t really know what to do at this point. I run enough firewalls and ad blockers that using Chrome has never particularly bothered me from a usability standpoint, but I get the point everyone is trying to make. However, I also don’t want to spend weeks of my life fighting to get yet another open source program to work the same as the “other” program, or find some substitute that I can live with.
I used to use Firefox when I was a kid and loved all of the extensions. However, it seems severely lacking now. I tried to find something to give me group tabs, and found old abandoned projects or some tree thing that made 0 sense to me. I saw an article I think explaining that it is coming? I don’t understand why a feature like this is missing when it used to exist a long time ago. Seems like basic functionality to me. Also, why is the tab bar so big? It takes up a lot of screen real estate.
The thing that killed it for me was the lack of PWA support, which is how I have used Outlook for around 6+ years. I fought with the extension for a while and things sort of worked on and off for a few days here or there, but half the time it would open emails in the main browser anyway. Once it got to the point where Outlook was completely blank and refused to load at all, I gave up. I could never get it to work again. I hoped I could maybe setup the PWA to just be in Chrome or Safari, but it just opens it as a tab in Firefox anyway. I tried, but I am not going to spend hours fighting with it anymore at this point and it would be nice if it was built into the browser instead of a random extension.
It was a better experience on the phone, and I like the bar on the bottom, until I realized it was draining my battery. I found a thread of users complaining about it for the last few months with no fix. I don’t even use the sync feature, but that supposedly is the culprit? Phone kept dying and I barely used it. Looked at the battery usage screen and there it was, almost the top item. I would love to use Firefox on Android, but not at the expense of my battery. Sorry.
The extensions revamp that they did killed most of the really cool extensions. At that point, there was really no point in staying with Firefox.
The thing about tab grouping is a valid point. I’ve been living in my FF bubble for such a long time that I didn’t even know about tab groups.
I was able to test that feature on my work computer, and the groups are indeed really nice. Normally, I don’t really run into the problem that this feature solves, because I have several FF windows spread across several virtual desktops. This way, all the different topics can be kept well organized while still keeping the tab bar relatively neat and tidy. However, if you want to keep everything in a single window, groups would help with that. I really hope FF devs make that happen soon.
You can go to the Blink + V8 engine without using Google Chrome; in fact that’s exactly what you should be doing as Google’s browser has way more spyware built into it.
I hear ya. I’m still butthurt about Fx killing SSB (site-specific browser) before it even had a chance. They had the feature locked behind a flag & then removed it due to low usage. It seems a lot of folks hadn’t even heard of it til the news was out about it being removed. It would have been great to use since you could run something akin to
firefox --ssb https://url(I forget exactly the command, & you’d want to write it to cover Gecko forks), but it means you could ship some apps with justexec. Since the process was pooled with the main browser instance too, it wasn’t as taxing on resources as Electron.I’m fairly sure Microsoft is actively trying to screw Firefox. Outlook has always sucked in Firefox, teams is a shit show. When you use a useragent switcher somehow a lot of features seem to work magically in Firefox (which tells me MS is doing this on purpose).
For Outlook (exchange) I use Thunderbird with a paid plug-in (to make the 2FA stuff work). It’s pretty cheap and totally worth it for me at least.
Heh, “Don’t Be Evil”
they don’t say don’t anymore
Don’tBe EvilIt’s been a meme for a while now.
So, Google thinks they own the whole Internet now, and will force ads over every single website. AMP wasn’t enough for them. I used to love Google, but now I pretty much hate them.
Google has the lions share of the browser installs. If this were not the case, you can bet Google would never dream up this nonsense to begin with.
That doesn’t give them ownership of the content that people view with the browser.
I didn’t say it did. My point was that Google is getting away with it because they rely on ignorance and the lion’s share of browser installs.
Ain’t that the truth?
Is amp still around? Those cancerous links drove me back to Firefox after years of using Chrome, they hardly ever worked.
AFAIK they’re still around. I switched off of Google for searches because of them.
I’m still using google search, just deactivated amp. Initially with a Firefox add-on, now I think that’s a native feature.
But Google search results are increasingly bad, what alternative do you recommend? I’ve dabbled with bing and yandex (which is honestly quite good, but… Russian) and would like to have a real alternative.
Spend some time finding a few good searxng instances. Also, the language setting affects the results a lot, so make sure to change it based on what you’re searching for. I mostly use “english [en]”, but for local searches I change it to my native language, or to the language of the relevant country.
I tried a bunch of different services without satisfaction until I finally decided to try Kagi. It’s been 6 months and I’m still satisfied with it.
I keep coming across kagi but haven’t used it yet. Think I’ll give it a try finally.
It costs money, but to me it’s a small price to pay for my sanity. My average search volume is about 700 searches per month. That’s 700 times per month that I was getting frustrated, getting bombarded with ads, and being unable to find what I was looking for. Now I don’t have that problem, so my frustration levels have decreased considerably.
Yep I’ve just signed up for the free trial and will use it in parallel to google to get a feeling for the difference. Since I’m using google with anti-tracking and adblock, I don’t really get annoyed by the site itself, more like the crappy top-ranking SEO pages. Back in the days, the front page was all I ever needed, now I feel like the good results start on page 2.
Brave Search has been alright, tho I’m not entirely sure how their algorithms are working & they index much slower so they probably aren’t doing full aggregation themselves nor does it seem that they are just using Bing like DuckDuckGo. Yandex is great for image search & I use their translation service even if it’s a little weaker just to spread my data across services instead of centralizing. Even if I preferred content written by a human, a lot of general queries it seems I am more prone to reaching for an LLM …even tho it could be a hallucination, a lot of the content written by folks on the highest SEO sites are just as much bullshit.
The only thing keeping me from making the jump to Firefox is the fact you still can’t create shortcuts to web pages that open in their own window like apps the way you can in chromium browsers. I find that feature incredibly useful so I’m sticking with thorium/librewolf etc for now. But once the enshittification is complete I guess I’ll have to learn to live without it because I definitely aren’t giving up ad blockers for it.
im on linux so i use bind a command to a shortcut, like
firefox https://lemmy.mlu can probably do similar things on windows
Tried it with librewolf on Linux but couldn’t get it to work
Sure can!
If you wish to vet the project https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox
Or the direct FF extension here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/
Amazing, thanks! I’ll give it a go!
You can do that on Firefox mobile. IDK if it works on the desktop.
Why would you need to move to Firefox when you’re using Librewolf? You’re just confusing yourself, you don’t have to since it’s already a fork of Firefox.
Whoops, meant to say Vanadium 😊 I do have librewolf installed on my Linux box but it’s not my daily driver
TLDR: Google’s Manifest V3 will stop many ad blockers from working on Chromium browsers. This is to increase ad revenue. Non-Chromium browsers like Firefox won’t be affected.
Oh they’ll be affected. Swim or sink.
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Maybe the only thing FF users will notice is the chrome exodus. That counts as being affected, right?
Tldr?
More ads, and you can’t block them because ad blockers will be banned
Thank you sir