this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I've been way more than a decade (closer to two decades) uninterruptedly using Firefox. I've never used chrome as a my main browser, ever.
But still, I'll be naive if I didn't recognize that this kind of shit will affect me even if it's just indirectly.
Next year they'll surely will be forcing many webs only working in "manifest V3 compliant browsers". I'm sure of that.
The problem is that Firefox has like a crumb of the market and it's held by a lifeline given by Google itself
There is no guarantee Firefox would survive the long term ... Heck it would die short after Google decides to cut them off
Back in the Dim Times (1990s), before ad-blockers appeared, there was a program called WebWasher. It's basically a proxy server you run on your own computer and it contained all the ad filters. You just configured your browsers network setting to point to WebWasher and it would handle all the ad filtering.
So even if companies completely remove extension support from their browsers, we'll still have an alternative. :)
That man-in-the-middle principle doesn't work with TLS.
But ads are still often delivered by content delivery which is blockable by domain, hence the reason piholes work. Not that in-stream ads aren't the future, perhaps, but life finds a way.
What you're describing is not a man-in-the-middle proxy, but a simple DNS block. That's a very crude approach to blocking ads and notoriously doesn't work for YouTube and Google ads because they're served from the same domain.
I run a pihole myself but there's still a huge difference between browsing with pihole only and pihole+ublock. It's certainly not the answer to the Manifest V3 shenanigans.
Still not unheard of today if you're using a VPN. For example, if you're using Mozilla VPN (Mulvad), in the DNS settings it gives you choices between regular DNS, DNS + ad blocking, or DNS + ad blocking + tracker blocking.
I did not know about WebWasher, that's very interesting.
Hey that's awesome! Thanks for sharing
Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant
Maybe it's my tinfoil hat but if any part of this is related to ~~their~~ google's pursuit of ad revenue, I don't imagine a v3 compliant Firefox will work with adblock for long.
At the very least they would probably make using it a huge headache
edit to make it clear who I was referring to
Firefox has ad revenue?
I'm realizing that was unclear.
I meant google's naifest v3, not firefox's implementation of it.
Ah, appreciate the clarification. I'd also just woken up and hopped on Lemmy, so maybe partially my fault 😋
I switched to chrome because they were the first to have each tab be it's own process so one bad site/connection did crash the whole program. Also the cloud based password saving across devices was super convenient.
Firefox does both now too, has better ad blocking, and is a little less invasive and bloaty. A lot less invasive if you know how to set it up, which I don't.
But yeah, Firefox is my guy again
Same here. Made the switch back to Firefox a year ago when I saw the writing on the wall about where Google wanted to take Chrome with Manifest V3.