this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
406 points (95.7% liked)
Open Source
41020 readers
165 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For now
So when they do just fork it?
I likely won't touch it anyway, but it is fully open source, so it can be forked easily. With the transition to Swift I suspect there would be plenty of devs who could take things forward if they wanted to.
If you look at history, Google did the opposite with Chrome, they forked an open source browser and turned it into the world's most used.
I guess we'll see.
Thats google though, with the added ability to put it direct into an extremely common OS (Android). With ladybird, you've got an apparent neocon and 3 years currently planned for a GA release (2028). Its future is already pretty uncertain regardless of sponsorship.
say the same for chrome, and think again if you mean it seriously.
Iridium, cromite, edge, brave, thorium, vivaldi, pale moon....
And this is a drastically simpler browser that would be in swift 6.
and what can they do against the manifest v3 migration? they cannot afford to keep maintaining the code for mv2 addons. it is an important topic for efficient content blocking.
its funny you bring up edge as an alternative. brave too has opt-out telemetry and other shenanigans.
I was answering forking and how realistic it is. You're changing the conversation into specifics around chrome.
As I mentioned, this would be (not is, because its not even at a GA state) drastically simpler to fork, and there are many forks of a substantially more complicated browser already.
I'm not changing anything. they are powerless. if google decides to change chrome for the worse in a more significant way than UI design, they cannot avoid accepting that change.
Your example was Mv3. There are plenty of Chromium browsers that still support ~~Mv3~~ Mv2. What's your point?
all up to date chromium browsers support Mv3.
if you meant Mv2, I doubt they will be able to keep up with the support for long. for now it's very easy, because all the code is still there in the engine (recently you could still reenable it even in google chrome), but once chromium starts to refactor code, to make it simpler or more modern, those changes will not be done with kerping Mv2 support in mind, and fork devs will have an increasingly harder time to patch back support for it (safely!) as time goes on.
Yup! Edited the comment.
Out of curiosity - have you tried any of the fully Mv3 compatible adblockers yet? I stopped using uBlock Origin a while ago, switched to AdGuard and Ghostery. Right now I'm running Ghostery exclusively (because they help with the cookies pop-up) and... it just works. Still blocks ads as well as uBlock ever did.
I can't find them now, but I saw some articles saying that actually Mv3 offers some new tools that help achieve adblock goals easier than Mv2 allowed. I have no clue if that's true or if that's a paid shill trying to calm people down, but from my own perspective, Mv3 seems to be painted as a much bigger baddie than it is.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm not using any chrome browsers.
so your benchmark is what you see? that's far too little in my opinion. I want to block tracking more than ads. but Mv3 blockers don't have the capabilities for that anymore. Mv3 is useless for that, google knows full well what they have done.
I highly doubt there's any truth in that. Mv2 blockers can do whatever they want with any asset that gets loaded.
ok, no, there's an exception. on chrome, Mv2 blockers could not filter traffic at browser startup (when previous tabs are automatically loaded), but that's a chrome defect and this was not an issue on Firefox for a very long time (if ever)
some wiki article s from the developer:
Sure thing bud.
Now back to the actual topic.....
Well, there is a lot of panic about the change from Mv2 to Mv3, and also a lot of misinformation. It's correct that Mv3 adblocker are somewhat less effective (independent tests don't show much difference, but in change offer a way better security). Inbuild adblocker won't be affected and in other extensions not related to adblocking, it's irrelevant for the user if it is Mv2 or Mv3. Mv2 will disappear sooner or later, same as Mv1 in 2013. Some Chromium Browsers still support Mv2 extensions some time longer (Vivaldi, Opera, Brave), naturally all FF forks, probably until next year, but Mv2 is dying, yes or yes. Only problem exist for uBO, due to it's specific structure need to be practically remade from scratch to be compatible with Mv3, until now Gorhill only released uBO Lite Mv3, Meanwhile AdGuard and Adblock Plus already are in Mv3
Differences
Sources:
[^2]: JShelter - What is Manifest v3 [^4]: Blocksi - Transition to Chrome Manifest Version 3 [^5]: Avanite - Manifest v3 and WebData Control [^6]: Privacy vs. Profit: The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3
what do those test measure? only what is visible, that is percentage of ads hidden? or does it take into account all the tracking shit regular ublock origin can thwart? I don't buy that it's "somewhat" less effective, and neither that it is more secure.
that's not a problem with browsers like firefox, where the webrequest api was kept for Mv3.
there are plenty of other addons that make use of the webrequest API, they are just not so well known that half of the average desktop users know it. those are affected too.
that's false. ublock simply cannot do lots of things with Mv3 that it can with Mv2. lite is lite for a reason, and not because in short time thats all he could put together.
then your quote just brings up google propaganda. restrictions of useful features are dressed up as "security", just like google does it again but now with android with a different approach.
As said, the differences in adblocking is irrelevant, way more important the improved tracking blocker of Mv3. You won't see any ads using uBO Lite, Adblock Plus or AdGuard Mv3. Apart with an inbuild ad/trackingblocker it's irrelevant, there don't exist the limit of filterlists like in the extension..
Anyway it isn't even worth such panic about this, there are always enough tools out there to show the middlefinger if you are worried about it, I'm not.
https://realityripple.com/Tools/AdBlock++/