I hope this isn't a precursor to removing support for other AdBlock addons(MV2) citing native availability of an AdBlock engine and then gradually shift to acceptable ads etc.
OsrsNeedsf2P 2 hours ago [-]
The day Firefox drops MV2 is the day I find a new browser. We're already at <1% usershare, it's not like there's safety in numbers here
pogue 2 hours ago [-]
I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.
Brave still allows you to install uBlock & some other extensions that should technically not be supported under MV3, but they still ship it with support for those.
Just heard about Helium browser, which is just dechromium + uBlock and it's still beta.
nuker 40 minutes ago [-]
> Firefox is the last holdout.
Nope, FF is being infiltrated by adtech for last year or two. Last holdout is Safari now :)
cookiengineer 1 hours ago [-]
> I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.
My last hope is ladybird right now, I don't use Firefox or Chrome as my main browsers anymore, and use them only within temporary sandboxes. Without history, without cookies, without logins for the most part.
el_io 1 hours ago [-]
Ladybird supports MV2? I had no idea they have extensions.
laserbeam 25 minutes ago [-]
Ladybird is many years away from being usable by a casual human. The hope is it turns out to be a great browser eventually.
pogue 1 hours ago [-]
You use ladybird as your primary web browser? And it works?
cookiengineer 57 minutes ago [-]
For the most part, it doesn't. It's not a consumer ready browser, but a pretty nice little rendering engine. If you use ladybird as bindings, it's a bit unstable right now because they are refactoring a lot of parts in the codebase.
I built my own tools on top of it, mostly to use internet websites and selfhosted kiwix archives with my local agentic env.
I guess what I am saying is that I don't have a primary browser anymore. Not a browser where I just can trust it that it doesn't do shit with my data. Being able to selfhost kiwix is a superb internet experience if you build your own search dashboard for it, I can fully recommend it.
Have to merge my things upstream with ZIMdex when I have the time (probably around June).
Could definitely be writing on the wall that MV2 support will be deprecated in the future but imo not necessarily a bad thing if it’s not actively developed anyways. Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.
That said, if this is writing on the wall I’d hope they’ll listen to the community this time and allow the engine to be extended / make it such that a block all ads feature always exists. I’m cautiously optimistic given Mozilla’s track record just over the past year-ish. They have released some great new features that help bring Firefox closer to feature parity with other browsers.
I am a Firefox hopeful and recently switched back to using it as my daily driver when Arc went belly up (but mainly for uBlock Origin support).
charleslmunger 2 hours ago [-]
>Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.
There is no feature Firefox provides that is more differentiating than ublock origin. As long as pages load and security issues are patched it is the reason to choose Firefox as a browser. What would they prioritize over it?
zephyreon 2 hours ago [-]
I’d like to see more investment in their new profile manager. It feels pretty barebones at the moment. Arc had the ability to link profiles to “spaces” and you could easily switch between them without opening a new window. It was very nice to so easily swap between personal, work, & side business.
collabs 1 hours ago [-]
The multi user containers are also very nice.
Dylan16807 2 hours ago [-]
> Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.
The feature that better adblockers need is one callback that's similar to one that's still in V3. It's not difficult to keep if it's your own codebase.
striking 1 hours ago [-]
Try Zen! Firefox fork with Arc-like UX.
pjjpo 54 minutes ago [-]
Zen is great and still mostly Firefox. I use standard Firefox on Android and everything syncs without hassle. The experience is so much better that personally cannot imagine using Chromium anymore. Of course I do wonder if the entire Firefox ecosystem is sustainable long-term funding wise.
Steve6 2 hours ago [-]
I migrated from Firefox to Brave years ago, and it's been incredible. It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff and turn on more advanced privacy protection. Then it's just a fast browser with awesome adblocking.
My favorite recent feature has been Brave Scriptlets, which are just little javascript functions you can run on specific sites. I've replaced most of the add ons I used with small scripts. Pretty nice.
I would prefer an engine not built on Chromium... but I've lost faith in Mozilla. I'm glad that Firefox added a built in adblock engine, but it seems too late too late. Brave has been awesome, and being Chromium based gives them time to keep working on stuff that matters.
dlcarrier 25 minutes ago [-]
It's too bad that Mozilla does everything they can to alienate its users, with failed attempts to attract a different but non-existent new user-base. Without them, and with Safari being run by a company that likes to tie its software to its hardware, there's pretty much no reasonable non-Chrome-based web browsers, so it's the new Internet Explorer, and many web pages only work on it, because no one tests their web pages on anything else.
vachina 6 minutes ago [-]
I don’t see how supporting Chromium is better than not supporting an alternate rendering engine. Firefox for the end-user is fantastic.
abdullahkhalids 1 hours ago [-]
The Greasemonkey Firefox addon that allows you to run site specific JS has been around for two decades [1].
Even better now that they have a paid offering with all that crap stripped out (Brave Origin) which is free on Linux.
pogue 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone has made these Brave debloat tools that basically do the same thing as their ridiculous Origin offering.
To sell for $60 a web browser that technically has all the features removed is a pretty goofy move.
topspin 17 seconds ago [-]
> a pretty goofy move
I'm doing a goofy thing and buying it. I didn't know this existed till I read this thread. I've been benefitting from Brave for many years now; it's great that they've provided a way to pay for this without dealing with the crypto stuff, and I'm extremely happy to do so, because they deserve some of my money.
cr125rider 1 hours ago [-]
Eh that’s a common business model. Pay to get the ads removed is basically the same thing.
If your mind goes to TLS when you read crypto, you surely do live under a rock ... in bliss.
devsda 38 minutes ago [-]
As a developer, personally I would be worried if that wasn't my first thought when someone uses browser and crypto together :D
gbil 1 hours ago [-]
If this means that they release a iOS version with the same Adblock features as brave then I’m sold.
I use essentially all OSs and I want a browser with basic features like adblocking/custom filters on all the platforms and currently Firefox fails this on iOS devices.
Still I believe the Firefox sync is much more robust than eg. Brave one , among various platforms.
But then I will also need Firefox to fix keyboard shortcuts on Android which they had until the Fenix rebase some years ago and still haven’t fixed since
MrAlex94 2 hours ago [-]
I think people are reading into this too much - I don’t think Mozilla would ever implement an actual full spectrum ad blocker (although who knows with the new direction Firefox is headed), this will likely be used as an improvement/replacement for the current tracking protection implementation.
Weirdly enough, the same time this was added to Geckko is when I started implementing the adblock-rs library for Waterfox - I stumbled across the bindings by accident when using searchfox on the main branch instead of esr140! Quite the coincidence doing it at the same time.
nextaccountic 3 hours ago [-]
Does this benefit people that use uBlock Origin?
Maybe uBlock Origin for Firefox could be updated to make use of this
toofy 2 hours ago [-]
sounds like it just uses ublocks lists.
though it doesn’t seem to work as well as ublock, the ad slots are still there with just the ad missing so there’s a giant ugly blank spot.
This feels like a betrayal of their ousting of Eich in the first place. I can't imagine a world I would do this and be able to look at myself in the mirror.
dlcarrier 21 minutes ago [-]
The whole organization is a huge mess that doesn't really want to accept any management.
prox 3 minutes ago [-]
They try to make it feel like an “us” browser, but it just comes off as a corp trying to talk cool.
You have to walk the walk too Mozilla! Saying that as a FF for years.
yborg 1 hours ago [-]
>"their"
It's an entirely different management team.
Paul-Craft 55 minutes ago [-]
I can certainly imagine such a world. I don't use Brave because I don't want to support Brendan Eich.
fishgoesblub 2 hours ago [-]
It's surprising, and disappointing that this hasn't happened sooner. A real shame that it took a browser company other than Mozilla to make (In Rust no less!) adblock-rust. I wonder if this could've been a native Firefox feature and selling point years ago if Eich wasn't kicked out.
Rendered at 05:29:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Brave still allows you to install uBlock & some other extensions that should technically not be supported under MV3, but they still ship it with support for those.
Just heard about Helium browser, which is just dechromium + uBlock and it's still beta.
Nope, FF is being infiltrated by adtech for last year or two. Last holdout is Safari now :)
My last hope is ladybird right now, I don't use Firefox or Chrome as my main browsers anymore, and use them only within temporary sandboxes. Without history, without cookies, without logins for the most part.
I built my own tools on top of it, mostly to use internet websites and selfhosted kiwix archives with my local agentic env.
I guess what I am saying is that I don't have a primary browser anymore. Not a browser where I just can trust it that it doesn't do shit with my data. Being able to selfhost kiwix is a superb internet experience if you build your own search dashboard for it, I can fully recommend it.
Have to merge my things upstream with ZIMdex when I have the time (probably around June).
[1] WIP https://github.com/cookiengineer/exocomp
[2] WIP https://github.com/cookiengineer/zimdex
That said, if this is writing on the wall I’d hope they’ll listen to the community this time and allow the engine to be extended / make it such that a block all ads feature always exists. I’m cautiously optimistic given Mozilla’s track record just over the past year-ish. They have released some great new features that help bring Firefox closer to feature parity with other browsers.
I am a Firefox hopeful and recently switched back to using it as my daily driver when Arc went belly up (but mainly for uBlock Origin support).
There is no feature Firefox provides that is more differentiating than ublock origin. As long as pages load and security issues are patched it is the reason to choose Firefox as a browser. What would they prioritize over it?
The feature that better adblockers need is one callback that's similar to one that's still in V3. It's not difficult to keep if it's your own codebase.
My favorite recent feature has been Brave Scriptlets, which are just little javascript functions you can run on specific sites. I've replaced most of the add ons I used with small scripts. Pretty nice.
I would prefer an engine not built on Chromium... but I've lost faith in Mozilla. I'm glad that Firefox added a built in adblock engine, but it seems too late too late. Brave has been awesome, and being Chromium based gives them time to keep working on stuff that matters.
[1] https://www.greasespot.net/2005/03/
To sell for $60 a web browser that technically has all the features removed is a pretty goofy move.
I'm doing a goofy thing and buying it. I didn't know this existed till I read this thread. I've been benefitting from Brave for many years now; it's great that they've provided a way to pay for this without dealing with the crypto stuff, and I'm extremely happy to do so, because they deserve some of my money.
Brave Just Released a Paid Browser: Here's What You Need to Know https://youtube.com/watch?v=3i5KH0l895o
I'm living under a rock, but my first thought was that you turned off TLS.
Weirdly enough, the same time this was added to Geckko is when I started implementing the adblock-rs library for Waterfox - I stumbled across the bindings by accident when using searchfox on the main branch instead of esr140! Quite the coincidence doing it at the same time.
Maybe uBlock Origin for Firefox could be updated to make use of this
though it doesn’t seem to work as well as ublock, the ad slots are still there with just the ad missing so there’s a giant ugly blank spot.
You have to walk the walk too Mozilla! Saying that as a FF for years.
It's an entirely different management team.