Most 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.
Very useful video. I miss that you don't list the Chromium browsers. A lot of people, the target audience of this video don't know that edge, opera, vivaldi, brave are all affected some way.
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.
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.
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.
I already switched to Firefox a while back. The new tracking system bullshit was the last straw. Chrome team is too busy trying to invasively track us rather then actually improving the browser for consumers.
Left for Firefox when they announced this update. I still have to use Chrome when I work in Google drive since basic functions like copy/paste don't work in non-chrome browsers, but even without this update the minute+ time it takes for chrome to open reminds me I made the right decision.
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.
I liked it, the other comments already suggested some things about your mic so I'll just ask for subtitles as a non-native speaker, specially because that allows you to add details if needed.
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.
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.
I like the artstyle, but the Mv3 blocking API has actually been improved to the point where uBO Lite, the Mv3 version of uBlock Origin, can block YouTube ads and only fails in edge cases.
Also, Safari technically has the same extensions support as Firefox does, but developers have to pay to distribute their extensions. That doesn't stop the existence of AdGuard.