The new MV3 architecture reflects Google’s avowed desire to make browser extensions more performant, private, and secure. But the internet giant’s attempt to do so has been bitterly contested by makers of privacy-protecting and content-blocking extensions, who have argued that the Chocolate Factory’s new software architecture will lead to less effective privacy and content-filtering extensions.
For users of uBlock Origin, which runs on Manifest V2, “options” means using the less capable uBlock Origin Lite, which supports Manifest V3.
Switch to Firefox.
yeah the solution here is so simple, yet most people seem allergic to firefox.
I don’t on mobile because it’s way too slow.
But I guess that isn’t applicable to this post because mobile Chromium doesn’t have ublock anyway…
And on linux, I have firefox issues with wayland because of some Nvidia thing. Chromium too, but its less severe and I can actually get GPU acceleration working.
How is Firefox slow? What exactly are you using Firefox for on mobile? These are honest question, I don’t understand.
They’re not wrong, benchmarks have been done on mobile firefox.
https://www.androidauthority.com/best-fastest-android-browsers-337802/
Firefox doesn’t lose every test, it even won one in the linked article, but chrome at least beats it in every other one and firefox comes in last several times.
Not to be the guy that deepthroats Mozilla or anything, but these benchmarks show it being at worst 1 second slower.
Like, Firefox really isn’t noticeably slower than other browsers in the vast majority of situations.
You’re not wrong, but it should be noted that ‘at worst 1 second slower’ means a lot more when the fastest time is under 2 seconds. Saving 1 second is kind of a big deal when you only have 3 to work with. Closing that much of a gap would be a huge win for Firefox.
Also worth noting that many of the linked tests are also not directly based on time, and the difference in benchmarking is still fairly substantial. With the exception of the singular test that it came out on top on, the best case among these benchmarks is that firefox mobile is 15-20% slower than Chrome. These benchmarks even include Mozilla’s own Kraken benchmark (where it still comes in last among these results).
Lastly, do want to say that I hope mobile firefox can catch up on these, but they’ve got a lot of work to do and the odds are stacked against them.
Like, Firefox really isn’t noticeably slower than other browsers in the vast majority of situations.
I imagine there is a bigger difference on older phones though. An imperceptable difference could easily become unbearable when the phone is a little outdated. I experience it at work using a slightly older PC on Windows 10.
It’s one thing to fail benchmarks, but another thing to be perceive so slow that you’d rather use chrome. Maybe I just have low standards in that regard.
An old Snapdragon 845 phone, lol. A razer phone 2.
It just feels sluggish. Pages render slower, especially larger ones, and it eats more battery, especially with extensions like adblockers running.
It’s especially apparent because the RP2 is like the oldest 120hz phone. Bromite (aka chromium) feels like butter in comparison.
Same story for me on a OnePlus 5T which is the even older Snapdragon 835. Firefox is genuinely unusable. I tried Mull and Iceraven too. For several months I tried to put up with it, but they were all a slow and buggy mess. Switched to Brave and it works fine.
I use Librewolf on my desktop for the record.
Firefox on mobile has extensions. You can have whatever ad blocker you want. You can automatically replace pictures of trump with kittens. I’m sure there are other extensions that are useful too. I’ll take that over some negligible purported speed increase any day.
Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.
mobile Chromium doesn’t have ublock anyway…
Kiwi browser on Android is Chromium based & has had the ability to add extensions such as uBlock for years
Indeed, though I prefer skipping extensions on mobile because (as said above) native implementations tend to be faster and more power efficient.
Ublock is probably an exception though. It’s quite fast.
I never left, because I’m not a sucker that fell for chromes marketing wank.
it wasn’t marketing wank. it was a significant performance difference. people forget Firefox 3.x but i remember. it was fireslug more like.
Exactly, i went from firefox to chrome because the performance. Got back to firefox a couple of years ago because the performance didn’t mather between those two.
I dunno man. I quickly learned to avoid Chrome at all costs because of the performance. Even when it was supposedly “good”, it was always a massive memory hog. Never had that issue with Firefox, and if it ended up taking a few seconds longer here and there to load a page, it would pale in comparison to the overall hit to the system from Chrome. Like being penny wise and pound foolish.
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And donate too!! We have to keep Firefox going to protect our privacy and security.
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Good thing I’ve always used Firefox.
Chrome always seemed more of a curiosity than something I needed to use. I never saw the need to switch from Firefox when Firefox did everything I wanted.
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Looks up LibreWolf on AUR
Holy dependencies batman!
What do you mean by that?
(I’m a filthy casual)It just has a crap load of software packages it depends on to work properly (though a number of them seem like fonts). I have reasonably fast computer, and it’s been compiling for about 45 minutes at this point.
Use librewolf-bin or just use the flatpak
Just did with librewolf-bin, thanks. I always forget to look for the binary packages specifically on AUR.
Ah compile… guess I’ll stick with regular Firefox. There are some magiks I don’t tamper with.
You don’t need to compile it. There’s a flatpak, and the AUR has a binary package
How is the flatpak system? I’ve never dug into it.
It’s really nice. It’s compatible with all Linux distros and it provides some configurable sandboxing via bubblewrap that you don’t get with other repos. The sandboxing is easilly configurable using a GUI like Flatseal.
I mean, if you’re intimidated by compiling you probably shouldn’t be using Arch to begin with.
(I’m hoping that you didn’t understand the “on AUR” part of the comment as well as the “dependencies” part, and actually use a more reasonable distro that isn’t subject to the issue @bobs_monkey is complaining about.)
You’re right. I don’t even know what Arch is to want to try and use it.
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Arch is a Linux distribution that intentionally requires a bunch of relatively-complicated manual steps to install, so “I use Arch BTW” has become a meme among people who want to brag about how ‘l33t’ they are.
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AUR is Arch’s package manager.
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A package manager is a software database that lets you easily install apps with a single command (e.g.
[tool-name] install [app-name]) along with all the software libraries they depend on (i.e. their ‘dependencies’), such that you only need one copy of each library no matter how many apps use it.
(Without a package manager, there are two other ways installing apps can work: either an app can come with its own copy of all its dependencies, which means it takes up a lot of disk space unnecessarily, or the user can be responsible for installing all the dependencies separately, which is a gigantic pain in the ass. Windows takes the former approach, while Linux, before package managers were invented, tended to do the latter because open-source software was distributed mostly as source code you had to compile and link yourself.)
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You don’t need to compile it. There’s a librewolf-bin package which provides a precompiled binary, or you can use the Flatpak.
Anyone that’s used Librewolf mind offering their opinion on it? That description sounds pretty sweet.
It’s the best. Deletes all cookies and browsing data on exit by default. I changed it to keep history and cookies for a handful of sites
Turned up uBO to strict mode and installed JShelter to get rid of most clientside fingerprinting (this will cause some breakage on a site by site basis though, which is quick to be fixed. Mostly on sites that are dynamically managed by JS instead of the way it’s meant to be)
What’s jshtler is this like noscrypt?
Not really, NoScript prevents executing all JavaScript by default. JShelter instead strongly limits what JS can do and spoofs some values to throw of fingerprinters. It also has a network boundary shield (mostly blocking cross sites post/get requests. Same for lan to prevent your local network being scanned etc). And it comes with a fingerprint detector which allows you to see which websites want to track you the most (I avoid those whenever possible)
Deletes all cookies and browsing data on exit by default
This would make for an extremely annoying browsing experience.
True
That’s why I changed it to keep all history and cookies on pages I whitelisted
It is pretty sweet. Used it as my main browser for a year. It comes pretty hardened. Try it out for sure its worth it.
I quite enjoy using it. Stays out of the way, boots instantly, is very plain looking.
In my experience, the Flatpak variant of Firefox on Linux is the swiftest among Firefox-based browsers.
It’s great. It’s essentially Firefox, but without the unnecessary bullshit like Sponsored sites or Pocket integration, and it has some quite significant privacy and security improvements. Also comes with uBlock Origin pre-installed.
It’s a bit too restrictive by default imo, good for privacy but you will need to change quite a few setting if you want to browse normally.
Despite my opinion it’s the browser I use most on my laptop.
I’ve had librewolf specific bugs absent in firefox, definitely not a strict upgrade.
I’ve used Librewolf until pretty recently and I say it’s not for everyone. It’s hardened Firefox made into its own thing for people who want the benefits of hardened Firefox but don’t want to go through the effort of hardening their Firefox install.
There are some sites that wouldn’t work in the strictest settings. As far as I remember, the most problematic sites with Librewolf are those that demand way too much in terms of privacy and security, so I took it as a given that if a site doesn’t work with Librewolf (with me using the default settings), it’s not worth it to enter to begin with.
I switched to Firefox the same time I switched to Linux and I switched to Linux with the reddit enshittification.
I still prefer Chrome over Firefox but I’ve been running Firefox for over a year now and won’t go back to Chrome because fuck Google. Also stopped using Google for searching and not being tracked is very very noticeable.
Tried using chromium based browser instead? You are not mainlined into Google that way. Vivaldi is absolutely great. It’s got way better baked in features than chrome which can reduce need for extensions and it has a strong commitment to pushing chromium as far as possible to be privacy conscious. Runs and syncs across Android and pc as well.
Those are all chromium based. They all are connected to google and will all have the manifest v3 change.
That is unless they will support v3 but keep some doors open for content blockers ( this is mozillas plan )Yes all chromium based browsers are chromium based. What do you mean by they are connected to Google? Yes Google provides the chromium code, but my Vivaldi browser isn’t connecting to Google servers or sending them anything
What i meant is that chromium is owned and managed by google. If chromium ( and therefor all chromium based browsers ) gets a change, they all do by default. Things like vivaldi or brave will get this change unless they specifically implement ways around it, which i dont think they will.
Though its way less than chrome, chromium still has links with google and has been found to ping google once in a while even though youre not using google.To be accurate, chrome in itself is a chromium based browser. Its chromium with google stuff slapped onto it.
Its because of this that i find the “but im using [chromium based browser here], so i wont be affected by change x” a false one, because they will.
“change unless they specifically implement ways around it, which i dont think they will.”
I’m sorry my friend, but I get the impression you are speaking from a perspective of ignorance.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-webrequest-and-ad-blockers/
I am corrected, thanks :) Im legit surprised they did anything towards the issue, so thanks for pointing it out.
That said, ad blocking is only a part of the problem and there are a lot of extensions that work on content loading in browsers that are going to be invalidated with the chromium update that an integrated ad blocking feature ( that i hope you can customise to your hearts content ) will not fix…This is great news, Vivaldi is my fav ‘side’ browser
Honestly this might be a good thing. It might push more users to Firefox causing more competition for Chrome/Chromium.
In my +5000 workforce org only chrome and edge are allowed in mdm…
Expect a bump in Firefox users.
Going to plug Cromite (a continuation of Bromite) for a great Chromium fork with built in adblocking, and no nonsense like Brave or whatever: https://github.com/uazo/cromite
Also great on Android (which it was originally developed for).
Forks maintained by a hero dev are less than ideal (and not sustainable TBH), but this is where we are…
Does Cromite have support for auto-filling from 3rd party password managers? When I last used Bromite, it couldn’t so I never ended up using it as my main browser
Yes, I use it with Bitwarden
Guess, I will need to stop using Chrome unless I have no other option (I mostly use Firefox, but I occasionally use Chrome).
i use vivaldi for my school stuff. wonder if the v2 version of ublock will keep working. and the built in blocker in brave?
Google is such a greedy group of jackasses. Using their browser monopoly to shore up their ad monopoly should be a crime.
Safari all the way
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension.
The most salient of these is the blocking version of the webRequest API, which is used to intercept and alter network traffic prior to display.
Under Manifest V2, it’s what extension developers use to stop adverts, trackers, and other content appearing on pages, and prevent certain scripts from running.
The new MV3 architecture reflects Google’s avowed desire to make browser extensions more performant, private, and secure.
Li acknowledged the issue by noting the ways in which Google has been responsive, by adding support for user scripts, for offscreen documents that have access to the DOM API, and by increasing the number of rulesets in the declarativeNetRequest API (the replacement for webRequest) to 330,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamics ones.
And by the beginning of 2025, when the API changes have been available for some time in the Chrome Stable channel, Manifest V2 extensions will stop working.
The original article contains 589 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Firefox? More like fire chrome amirite? 🥁
