Last year, Google announced plans to phase out Manifest V2-based browser extensions in favor of new Manifest V3 policies. Although Manifest V3 promises increased safety and “peace of mind,” developers argue that the new rules hurt innovations, decrease performance, and cripple content blockers without giving much better security. Google initially wanted to disable Manifest V2 extensions in Chrome in January 2023 but has now decided to revise its plans.
In a new Chrome Developers blog post, the company describes an updated timeframe for migrating from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3. Although Google remains on track to ditch old extensions, developers and customers gained one more year for using and supporting Manifest V2-based extensions. According to the revised schedule, Google will remove them from the Chrome Web Store on January 2024.
Chrome is an advertising delivery platform first and foremost, and anyone with even a hint of foresight and a disdain for ads should’ve switched to Firefox years ago. At this point, using Chrome is self-inflicted.
I think of it this way: Those servers burn through a lot of electricity, and electricity isn’t free, so someone has to view those ads and pay for YouTube Premium, so it might as well be people who can’t be bothered to look further than their nose.
Google also forbids VideoDownload Helper from working with YouTube as a condition for being allowed in Chrome Web Store, because downloading from YouTube is Premium-only according to Google. The Firefox version of VideoDownload Helper works fine with YouTube.
Switched back to Firefox long ago.
Another sneaky tactic of Chrome is requiring a Google account to sync (Firefox works with any valid email address) and then using that account as default for all Google websites you visit, pushing you to have your browser history and bookmarks together with your main Google account, so they can better target you with ads.
Ok I understand ad blocking. That’s just good sense. I add block when I do only because there isn’t another way to support most of the sites out there, and If I find a site very useful and reputable I disable ad block for them. I don’t for the live of me understand the disdain for youtube premium. Its a freaking bargain. I get to support the creators and keep the lights on and avoid the terribly annoying and truly awful ads Just why are you avoiding paying for such a good service?
YouTube acquired its status as the default video hosting service of the web by being free while offering reasonable quality. As such, I will never support their attempt to set up a little tollbooth now that they’ve marginalized the competition. It’s a bait-and-switch, plain and simple.
When it comes to YouTube ads, I view them on my Nexus Player (which is where I do most of the watching) but block them on the desktop. The only ads I have a problem with are website ads, with their piles of javascript and their annoying habit of staking themselves on top of other ads or even website content. Just no.
kurkosdr,
That’s an interesting perspective. The thing that really turned me off is that advertising starts less intrusively but keeps progressing towards a sludge pit of incessant annoyance. While we are talking about the web here, it always follows the same pattern regardless of medium: Radio, TV, and cable ads that used to be reasonable have just gotten out of hand. Even with the channels and services you pay for there are more and more commercial interruptions displacing content. I used to buy & read more magazines but over time there was a huge inflation in the amount of ink dedicated to ads and that became a huge turnoff. The internet without adblocking is just awful. Internet streaming is going the same way, not only with ads on the platform, but increasing ads are in the content itself.
To me, the biggest problem with ads isn’t that they exist, but that they keep getting worse. And it’s not like the content gets better…just more interruptions. While advertisers will judge me for wanting to block their ads, many of them are guilty of filling our lives with so many damn ads that the audience becomes desperate to block them in order to reduce to level of noise in our lives.
I mean you don’t have to support youtube if you don’t want to, but you’re screwing over the creators too. That’s not something I can morally do. Those terrible website ads, really need to be solved. As established, I’d like to compensate the creators in some fashion, but no one has devised a sufficient system to compensate them, because its hard. Those most willing to pay to go without ads are the ones most valuable for the advertisers most willing to pay top dollar.
Take those dumb recipe blogs. I’m sure they have some good recopies there, but the ads are a non starter for me along with the seo optimized text length that requires the terrible prose of a backstory for the recipe. So, instead I just pay for access to known good recopies from a large corporation and don’t use the recipe blogs. Bad ads, no visits from me. Everything is on the square.
The `you’re screwing the creators` argument is tired. It comes off as the “creators” being entitled just because they’re “creators”. When people view the endless amount of advertising they get spammed with, everywhere, all the time, as a cancer, you’ll find them to be far less forgiving & willing to play along. All but a few percentage of creators could vanish tomorrow and life would be perfectly fine without their content.
Creators get compensated by getting a cut from the ads you view and you can always use the YouTube “thanks” feature or join their Patreon to give them money directly. Also, how much YouTube Premium is actually compensating creators? If it’s the same as the revenue they lose from the fact YouTube Premium users see no ads, then you are not supporting the artists one bit by paying for YouTube Premium.
friedchicken,
A lot of those creators are doing much better than I am as a developer, haha. Of course I know the invisible channels on youtube make a pittance. It feels harsh and unkind to actually say it, but they’re not that important to youtube. Google only needs the popular channels and wouldn’t you know it those are already making good money.
I can sympathize for those who are struggling, especially when google chooses to promote popular channels over them (this is one of my major annoyances with the platform BTW). But when the big youtubers getting the lion’s share of traffic are living so luxuriously, I don’t feel like they need my sympathy for it.
I agree with Bill Shooter of Bul when he said “…no one has devised a sufficient system to compensate them, because its hard.”, although with this twist: it’s really those at the bottom who face this struggle Those at the top have no problem at all. Heck google even assigns them their own human reps, a privilege not afforded to the masses.
Thom Holwerda,
Google has a very serious conflict of interest in controlling web technology. I’m experiencing more websites that only work under chrome. I couldn’t even place an online order at target the other day until I switched to chromium. While things haven’t yet gotten as bad as IE, we are regressing back to the days of a dominant browser monoculture.
Firefox sits at less than 5% and mozilla doesn’t have a viable path for completing against google, and apple unilaterally blocking alternative browsers on iphone/ipads hasn’t helped either.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2531201/mozilla-backs-move-to-decriminalize-iphone-jailbreaking.html
At least chrome ^B ium is open source, so there’s that, but our WWW standards are effectively in google’s hands. There might be legal hurdles, but technically there’s nothing stopping them from making life worse for alternative browser users. I’ve tested this in the past and they already give chrome users fewer captchas, for example.
Are the other Webkit / derivatives based browsers affected by these policies or it’s enough to just go with one of the alternatives like Vivaldi?
dsmogor,
That’s a really good question. Because the community has source code, the community has options, but the direction they take will depend on resources and goals.
I don’t know the intentions of the Vivaldi team, but other browser forks (ie pale moon) continue offering eliminated features (like XUL extensions) by forking a point in time snapshot that still had the desired features and then selectively merging updates. This can work for a time, however as upstream development progresses and there are updates that compound upon other updates (ie XUL->web extensions) it can be harder and harder to bridge diverging code bases. New desirable upstream features & optimizations will be based on some code that downstream projects intentionally haven’t merged due to that code’s negative repercussions. The result is that these types of forks can fall behind
The other approach is to follow upstream more closely (like waterfox following firefox ESR) and apply/remove specific features from this well-supported code base. Upstream devs can intentionally or unintentionally change their code in ways that break the 3rd party forks, which means that features must be reimplimented to work in terms of the new code base, or dropped.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/06/what-you-need-to-know-about-add-ons-in-waterfox-68/
There are pros and cons and it’s up to every community to decide how they’re going to handle it. Another thing to keep in mind is that 3rd party developers generally tend not to develop for/support niche browsers with a small user base. Even if there are forked browsers that continue to support the superior deprecated APIs, it doesn’t automatically mean extensions using them will be well supported & viable.
I agree with the article’s conclusions that the old ad blocking APIs offer far more flexibility in ad & tracker blocking capabilities and google is gimping them. I hope the FOSS community and users are willing and able to come together to stand up against google here, but as a David vs. Goliath situation it is not a sure thing. To date, ad blocking has been based on blocking HTTP requests, but ad blockers would really be in trouble if google decided to start actively detecting & blocking adblockers from the server side.
Webkit based browsers probably aren’t affected since Google split with Webkit and uses their own Blink rendering engine now. Safari and Epiphany definitely aren’t affected.
Chromium based browsers might have to carry out of tree patches which would increase their maintenance burden, but they’re probably already doing that.
It’s more a matter if Manifest V3 is incompatible with Manifest V2 since the other browsers have implemented the Manifest protocol to make extensions cross-browser compatible.
Talk about hanging their user base out to dry. So much malware still comes from ads, and Chrome sandbox escapes (or workarounds) have been a thing for a long time.
Unfortunately the main problem here really are the people. That is majority of people. They really couldn’t care less. And as such they are a perfect target for abuse. Firefox in the end proved that if you have a product that is at least as good as competition on the market. Your product will get used by a percent or two of people. If your name is Mozilla and the competitor name is Google. That is on why all the debates on GNU/Linux on desktop in comparison to lets say Windows are so futile. Making up things on why GNU/Linux on desktop is less popular choice. In reality it’s about one party that suggest and expect you will do the right thing. And the other party that will abuse you. Do whatever it takes for you to use their products and telling you you don’t have any other choice. And most people are more subjective to the latter. Hence Firefox can’t do much about it. People won’t chose it over Chrome. On the contrary people will argue Google is protecting them with Manifest V3 and Firefox is less safe not mandating it. With postponing mandating of Manifest V3 a lot of people now feel on why is it taking Google so long. Not making them safe. All in all a company such as ByteDance might have a chance against Google. If they ever decide to create a web browser. Such company could realistically challenge Chrome. Through abuse.
Geck,
Most users use what comes bundled with their device, I think that’s mozilla’s biggest weakness, unlike their rivals they don’t control any popular platforms.
Microsoft had a very strong browser monopoly with windows until government regulators came in. This gave way to alternatives including chrome and FF, both becoming very popular. However as google started making deals with software publishers to bundle chrome with lots of downloadable software, over time it would give them a bundling advantage over Mozilla.
For phones google has a major bundling advantage on android and apple on IOS. The mobile browser duopoly becomes extremely significant when considering the demographic shift from desktop to mobile where mozilla has 0% market share. It means that even a constant market share on desktop will shrink by over half in relation to the overall market. This was absolutely devastating for mozilla. To be fair they tried to build a mobile presence with their own phones bundling firefox, but their phones couldn’t compete with a android-ios duopoly. Defeating competitors on mobile was never really in the cards for mozilla.
I believe the firefox market share on linux desktops is relatively high because firefox actually does have a bundling advantage there. The problem is that desktop linux doesn’t have nearly enough marketshare to make a dent in the overall browser situation.
https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
Alfman.
Nop. The main problem here is majority of people couldn’t care less. That is on why after January 2024 we won’t see Firefox market share starting to increase. Google knows they can result to abuse and to get away with it. Google, Microsoft and Apple. They are all extremely abusive companies. To beat them you need a bigger abuser. Not somebody that is relying on people making the right choice. Like lets say with TikTok. Where you or some underage kid scroll an endless wall of short and meaningless videos. For a couple of hours a day. Frying your and their brain with dopamine. That is on why Facebook, Youtube, Instagram … are now in trouble. Because somebody was prepared to abuse even more. This big companies know what they need to give to people. To get them back for more. And they will shamelessly do it. Expecting people abused like that will switch to Mastodon or Friendica. That is like saying an alcoholic will suddenly start to drink water. Don’t count on that. If Firefox wants a bigger market share they will need to result to some form of abuse. To squeeze Chrome and Chromium based browser out of the market. The way they are doing it now won’t work. On top of that they can’t look the other way. They are letting the abuse go on. We all know that. And that is not all that noble in the end. Watching the abuse and saying but i can’t do nothing about it. Can’t you really?
Geck
You say “nop” here, but then you follow through with a logical “yes”. In fact your whole post seems to be predicated around you not being able to count on people switching their browsers.
My nop was directed at you trying to find a bunch of excuses. In the end i don’t really care. That is if you had 50% market share and lost it. Due to selling yourself to Google. Fight to regain it back or admit you are incompetent. And let somebody else try. We don’t need such servile and anemic Mozilla. They are just letting the abuse to carry on. And we are relying on them to do something about it. They obviously not doing anything about it. Force Chrome and Chromium based browsers out of the market. Become relevant. Otherwise you are just assisting with the abuse. Be abusive. In the end just do what we expect you to do. And what you claim you are after. By staying irrelevant you are really not doing that.
Geck,
It’s not an excuse so much as an explanation, one that aligns with your “people don’t care” rational I might add.
We know you well enough to know that you do care though, or at least did. You express frustration that FF and linux don’t have the market share you think they deserve and I’d even surmise this to be your main topic of interest based on your comments.
Am I right to notice that your feelings towards mozilla are shifting? I’ll admit I’m a bit surprised. I always saw you more as an optimistic evangelical and I expected you to remain that way no matter what we discussed.
PS. You know, I sometimes feel guilt in arguing against optimistic opinions. While it’s just me being a realist and saying what I believe, is it really worth being the villain of people’s happiness? Shouldn’t I just be happy that they’re happy? I don’t know if this is something I should work on being more sensitive towards. Mind you I am contemplating this in the context of my whole life and not merely osnews.
/reflection
Mozilla will have to do more in the future. To increase Firefox market share and by doing that to reduce Chrome and Chromium based web access dominance. On how they decide to tackle it. I don’t really care for now. As long as they do it. By paying device manufacturers for Firefox to get preinstalled. By lobbying for laws that will make it mandatory (quotas). By again having a more clear and loud voice when appealing to the general public… Currently they are just way too contempt. In doing nothing. And saying things like it’s OK by us. If people use or don’t use Firefox. As we respect their choice. Like playing dumb as if choice is really what is going on.
As for your question about tackling optimistic people. Be reasonable and well intended in constructive criticism. From time to time you need to put it more bluntly. As that makes sense. On the other hand don’t listen or pay attention to people that tell you you are not all that special. Most of the time it’s ill intended. Such people most often don’t have a solution to your problem. They tend to boost their ego and try to elevate themself. Last thing on their mind is your problems. And on how to solve them. Often such people are bad in solving problems in real life altogether. The reality is you indeed are special.
Geck
While its trivial to say they need to increase market share, still the “how” is of paramount importance.
Well, that would help increase the userbase, but realistically anything involving money gives google a massive advantage. Google will outlast mozilla in attrition warfare.
I am unable to rectify this suggestion with what you said earlier…”Nop. The main problem here is majority of people couldn’t care less…Google, Microsoft and Apple. They are all extremely abusive companies. To beat them you need a bigger abuser. Not somebody that is relying on people making the right choice.”
What if that constructive criticism hurts someone else more than it helps me? There’s a saying: do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Also “ignorance is bliss”. Haha.
Awkwardly, that person is me telling myself that…just another brick in the wall. Alas it might not be a great time to quote pink floyd…
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/pink-floyd-back-catalogue-roger-waters-ukraine/
Yes, I know the type all too well.
Anyway thanks for the Interesting conversation, I’m glad we can talk about our disagreements and still respect each other
Although most people couldn’t care less that doesn’t come down to Mozilla should care less. At minimum they should advocate for browser bailout on Android devices. Due to we again have an established monopoly in browser market. The same as it was with IE. And such monopoly is starting to get abused again. What Google is doing here is an equivalent of limiting APIs. Hence it’s time for browsers wars again. It’s time for Mozilla to gain a voice again. Otherwise best if somebody else does it. For us not to count on Mozilla if they have no intention whatsoever to improve things. Bottom line. Mozilla do your job. Start fighting against monopoly again. When you did that your market share was 10 times higher then now. Take a cue.
Quote: “Although Google remains on track to ditch old extensions, developers and customers gained one more year for using and supporting Manifest V2-based extensions.”
Nope, Google has gained one more year of me using its web browser. As soon as I can’t block adds (which most of them as pure intrusive spam) I will switch to another browser that allows me to do so.
franzrogar,
Well, it’s objectively a downgrade, but they are going to argue that you can. It’s a less effective method that forces plugins to use google’s own V3 blocker with a declarative API. Ad blocking extensions will no longer be able to build their own engines to detect/remove ads. This means ad blocking evolution will be in google’s control and completely out of the control of ad blockers.
It’s none of my business what browser you use, but IMHO you ought to switch now rather than threatening to switch later. Alternative browsers like FF are in desperate need of new users today. They face layoffs if they can’t stop the bleeding. Personally I use FF by default, but I still have to keep chromium installed for those pesky sites that have stopped supporting firefox. Momentum is creeping back to the browser monoculture years.
You most likely won’t switch and will take one for the team instead. Well. We’ll see next year. In the browser statistics.