Google halts purge of legacy ad blockers and other Chrome Extensions, again Back in December, Google postponed its Chrome Extensions shakeup because the project was unfinished and beset by bugs, after a previous schedule setback three months earlier. At the time, the Chocolate Factory promised revised guidance in March. Well, that month has been and gone, and the roadmap remains unclear: the Chrome …
"These improvements have shifted our timeline and we are keeping the community regularly updated on our progress. We are seeing strong developer interest in the security, privacy, and performance benefits that Manifest V3 brings."
Oh google, I love how you got into the spirit of April fools. You almost had me there you sneaky bastards.
FFS, has the world still learnt nothing since the disaster that was ActiveX plugins? Or did they deliberately have a meeting where they discussed how to make life easier for surreptitious cryptomining resource hoggers and other miscreants?
Userscripts, as fsr as I can recall, began life as bookmarklets — little bits of user-created code that lived entirely in a bookmark and executed on clicking said bookmark. Then came Tampermonkey, which allowed you to create your own sceipts, on your side of the browser, that could execute on page load. This was used mainly for stylesheet changing in the bad old days before Stylus.
You can put down your cane now, grandpa, nobody is remotely installing plugins on your PC. Except for widevine DRM......
Grandpa's old enough to remember the era of links like "Free Super Download Accelerator! Install for 6x faster downloads! Click here to download". It wasn't a good idea to do that....
And just because you know what you doing and what to avoid, doesn't mean that Auntie Mildred or Cousin Fred do............
User scripts are installed by the user and live on his or her device. They aren't random bits of code that download and run.
On these web pages, I have one called "WiderReg", which I wrote to expand the content and remove useless white space on The Register.
Yes indeed. I am considering migrating the company fleet to Firefox when MV2 is dead for just this reason.
Since Firefox finally supports GPOs there's no real reason to keep Chrome, except the pesky rogues in HR and Finance spewing confidential data all over Google Sheets.
That Google keeps delaying the start of MV3 hoping Firefox will perish if they just wait another year, that way they don't have to fear losing all the people that want functional adblock. Sure, there are other extensions I use and that people care about but that's the main reason I and most others care about extensions - given a choice between uBlock Origin and every other extension out there I'll take uBlock hands down and I think the overwhelming majority would agree with that.
Google of course claims that ad blockers will still be feasible with MV3, but I'm sure they will be watered down so they let through a lot more ads. I think Google is banking on most people living with watered down ad blocking - so long as it blocks the really annoying stuff like pop ups and hovers they will ignore all the banners and interstitials. So water down Chrome's ability to block ads = more money for Google and higher share prices for all its employee stock and options. Win/win for them, lose/lose for everyone else.
But the whole plan falls apart if everyone tells their friends "switch to Firefox and you can continue to block almost all ads like you used to" so they need Firefox to no longer be an option before they flip the switch.
Firefox needs to hold on for dear life. Thankfully, I don't think that's google's master plan, and a quick bard-less google search suggests that the MV3 changes will apply to all Chromium-based browsers and Safari, which means people will be forced to Firefox or any of its Gecko-based forks for a better browsing experience. Firefox will need enough market share to be able to resist Google Money long-term, which could make for an interesting duopoly.
As soon as I read about this last year I switched from chrome to Vivaldi.
Partly out of curiousity, partly because Google are evil and biased and party just to keep ad block plus going forward. Oh and because of resource usage and just to try something different.
I see no reason to switch back.
Maybe they no longer have the personnel to work on it. What is the worth of MV3? It is to squeeze a tiny alpha more out of advertising. That's not worth it - no decent ROI - any more. Google has been unable to focus its talents on anything other than directly maximizing revenue - they could not even maintain focus on their own Android apps, because those are one level of indirection away from advertising, and they lost significant US youth market share to Apple as a result.
Its supposed to have been for 'security' but nearly all addons come from the chrome store and they have infinite resources to fold, spindle, mutilate, and scan the addons, I just don't buy it.
I don't do any personal browsing using Chrome, only work-related browsing. With noscript and ublock origin, and having to work around that bastard cloudflare, sometimes it takes a couple of days to get some websites to work. For others, i just view source and search for text.
Too bad the EU doesn't prick up its ears now and start researching this. Then they'd be ready to bring charges on them a lot sooner than their usual "five years after something happens we are ready to declare we will stop it - by opening court cases that will take another five years to resolve!"
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