this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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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
Nothing specifically against Mozilla. As far as big techs go, they all have their hands covered in mud in some way. If anyhing, Mozilla would be one of the less dirty of them. As most everything else these days, rallying behind a big tech (as if that made any sense at all) is a matter of picking your poison.
My peeve with Firefox is that I think that it's just an overall worse browser, in terms of design and architecture, than Chromium, and it shows as it being mostly behind it in performance. As a software developer myself, this is important to me for an application that is a central part of my everyday life. I do use it sometimes as an alternate browser, and I realize that Firefox got a lot of improvement in the last few years, and that it's performance nowadays is really close to Chromium, but it all feel like lipstick on a pig kind of thing. I also quite dislike Mozilla's choices in UI design - every time they change it, it seems to be for the worse, as opposed to Chromium that has kept pretty much the same since its inception, with just relatively subtle changes since then.
I know I'll eventually get used to it, I guess I just dislike being forced to change.
userChrome file could resolve the UI thing, use something to have chromium interface
for performance, all that i could see is that profiles are ignored, both on chromium n firefox, i use a lot of profiles to minimize addons impact on performance, and with a lowend computer i always got a smooth xp on firefox