This is ultimately the endpoint of all Chromium-based browsers. Even the most stalwart will throw in the towel on MV2 support sooner or later, because the effort required to maintain non-trivial patches against mainline becomes too great for the team to keep up with.
It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.
Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the adblocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.
Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.
I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.
I wonder if this is from efforts to maintain the difference between upstream and Edge - such that Edge is trying to simplify development by following Chrome/Chromium closer.
The telemetry and ads (on start page) didn't bother you? I'm surprised there's seemingly a contingent of people who are too lazy to install any other chrome fork (eg. Brave), but are motivated enough to up sticks and switch to firefox the moment ublock is removed.
They have control over what they distribute. Chromium and Firefox are both open source and people can (and should) use derivatives they find acceptable.
DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.
I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.
>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.
They can block, it just has to be declarative unlike before. It's better than DNS adblockers since you can still do content filtering, CSS/JS injections and whatnot.
Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.
Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.
I honestly don't know how people do without ad blockers. Even with being ok with ads, they are so overwhelming that I could not use internet without blocking them
Humans are just so damn different in their tolerance to wasting time. I can't take feeling like I wasted 10 seconds of my time on an ad even when watching an video for recreation.
It's doubly crazy to me that someone would let a machine take their time like that. An inanimate object, and they give it any amount of respect instead of fixing it to do what they want.
If an ad isn't blocked, I fast forward through it. If I can't fast forward, I mute it. If I can't mute it, I'll mute my computer and change tabs for the duration. If it's a page in a magazine, I flip it quickly. If it's a billboard I'll avert my gaze. If it's in an airplane I take out my headphones and cover the screen.
I find being advertised to so annoying there's no way in hell I will spend my limited time on this planet willingly consuming an ad.
YT Music would be be better if I did not have to double check every of its suggestion for AI generation. Some accounts to make their AI use public which is nice but there's no way to see their channel info in YT Music to look for that.
I use noscript instead of an ad blocker. I find it blocks the intrusive ads. I do not mind what I view as normal ads (ie: text or link), but these video and popup ads drive me crazy. I find noscript blocks the "bad" ads.
In case your assumption here is that TFA is about Edge disabling adblockers: it's not. It's just removing ManifestV2 support. ManifestV3 is still supported. Despite what one might assume, MV3 does not seem to measurably diminish the effectiveness of adblockers; if anything, it improves it. (Source: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0027.php)
The only reason anyone knows about the switch between manifest 2 and 3 is that the only meaningful difference is the crippled ad blocking ability. Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
There is a dynamic API too that allows extensions to modify the blocklist at runtime.
I’ve been using UBlock Origin Lite on my iPhone for a while, and that works great, keeping itself updated from EasyList and allowing for custom rules.
In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.
>In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.
I don't how this is supposed to be a demerit given that the v2 version had full access to every site you visit. Safari just made that more explicit.
I use MV3 AdGuard and it blocks ads for me. I don't get the fuss about MV2 deprecation.. sure, MV3 is limited compared to firefox, but it's not like MV2 was that much better, no version ever supported rewriting request response.
MV3 DNR redirect is notably lame though, instead of replacing the response it generates a real redirect which breaks for example replacing the service worker response. But could MV2 webRequestBlocking replace the response? Well of course not.
Rules are limited (in syntax and number) and you can only ship updated rules with updated extensions (at least you can skip the queue if you only update rulesets but it's VERY annoying to do). It's also missing a bunch of features: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... (I see here that replacing response body is possible with Firefox only, is that your use-case?). MV2 was miles better.
Not saying this is it, but I never managed to block YouTube shorts with brave adblocker (in mobile), where I can do it with ublock. If you can do it, please explain, I promise I will try asap (I really dislike ff mobile UI).
On mobile (similar on Desktop), just go to Setting -> Shields and Privacy -> Content Filters.
In there are a bunch of Youtube related blockers (including Shorts), that I find work really well. Mobile Brave also lets you lock/screen off your phone while a YT video continues playing, which is a killer feature for listening to podcasts.
I found myself becoming addicted to YT Shorts, and Brave's filters totally solved my problem.
Brave said they’ll keep some select MV2 extensions, though that remains to be seen. Especially if it causes too much maintenance headache with upstream chromium. Also it seems that Brave now distributes these select MV2 extensions. So I’m not sure if they have forked them, or if they just repackage upstream.
I've used uBlock Origin Lite and have had no issues with blocking ads. The only downside I've seen is that I can't do "Block Elements" to hide non-ad annoying parts of sites.
Serious question: which sites have you encountered where ublock lite doesn't do the job? Even tricky sites (eg. youtube) are defeated with scriptlets, not by intercepting network responses.
Chromium being open source is not a mistake. Letting google be the sole driver and not forking it has been. People who want control over their browsers have options. It's a fight because most people don't care about these things.
There is no “browser business,” because people are - with rare exceptions - unwilling to pay for a web browser. Even Firefox is ad-supported indirectly via its default search contract with google.
Right. For example, Firefox Mobile doesn't support hitting ctrl+T to open a new tab, completely breaking flow for anyone on a tablet with a keyboard or their phone docked to a monitor.
This is ultimately the endpoint of all Chromium-based browsers. Even the most stalwart will throw in the towel on MV2 support sooner or later, because the effort required to maintain non-trivial patches against mainline becomes too great for the team to keep up with.
It's a great demonstration of how Chromium's open source nature is something of a technicality. Unless you have an army of software engineers on par with that of Google, you're eventually going to wind up living with Google's decisions whether you like it or not.
Non-user hostile browsers will just build in the adblocker. I have been using Brave Origin (the paid version of Brave that doesn't have all the extras) and the ad blocking has been very good, including YouTube, etc.
I don't think this is the case.
Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.
I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.
Brave's built in adblocker is on par to uBlock Origin for me.
I wonder if this is from efforts to maintain the difference between upstream and Edge - such that Edge is trying to simplify development by following Chrome/Chromium closer.
If this thread is indicative of the sort of browser discourse in <current year> it's no wonder Google won.
Nerds used to know how to computer, is what i'm saying.
Welp, the biggest reason that I use Edge just got thrown out, time to switch to Firefox.
The telemetry and ads (on start page) didn't bother you? I'm surprised there's seemingly a contingent of people who are too lazy to install any other chrome fork (eg. Brave), but are motivated enough to up sticks and switch to firefox the moment ublock is removed.
Ad blocking is a big deal.
Vivaldi for the win.
I love Vivaldi, but it also uses Chromium. If an extension is not in the Chrome Web store Vivaldi will not be able to install it.
Firefox seems to be the only reasonably mainstream option for proper ad blocking.
Why do browser vendors have such a control over browsers? Can anyone make a dll injection and bring back manifest v2 ?
They have control over what they distribute. Chromium and Firefox are both open source and people can (and should) use derivatives they find acceptable.
Running Unbound on my gateway with a curated adblock list. Easy setup, network-wide ad blocking on every device / browser.
DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.
I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.
>I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections?
No. See:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...
>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.
They can block, it just has to be declarative unlike before. It's better than DNS adblockers since you can still do content filtering, CSS/JS injections and whatnot.
Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.
Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.
Droped Chromium browsers and been using Safari with Wipr2, so far the best experience
I honestly don't know how people do without ad blockers. Even with being ok with ads, they are so overwhelming that I could not use internet without blocking them
I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.
So no youtube?
YouTube is tolerable with ads. If I found it intolerable, I would pay. Or not visit.
Humans are just so damn different in their tolerance to wasting time. I can't take feeling like I wasted 10 seconds of my time on an ad even when watching an video for recreation.
It's doubly crazy to me that someone would let a machine take their time like that. An inanimate object, and they give it any amount of respect instead of fixing it to do what they want.
If an ad isn't blocked, I fast forward through it. If I can't fast forward, I mute it. If I can't mute it, I'll mute my computer and change tabs for the duration. If it's a page in a magazine, I flip it quickly. If it's a billboard I'll avert my gaze. If it's in an airplane I take out my headphones and cover the screen.
I find being advertised to so annoying there's no way in hell I will spend my limited time on this planet willingly consuming an ad.
'Rainbow Dome Musick', by Steve Hillagr..glorious soothing music, then 30 mins in, a Barilla pasta advert. Sorry, youtube - I tried.
YouTube premium is one of the best subs you can buy if you watch a lot of YouTube. Plus you get Music.
YT Music would be be better if I did not have to double check every of its suggestion for AI generation. Some accounts to make their AI use public which is nice but there's no way to see their channel info in YT Music to look for that.
Cant say I've ever heard any AI generated music on YTM before
This probably depends on if you've used it enough to make some playlists and give it an idea of the real music that you like.
Most laypeople I know haven't seen an ad blocker in action ever.
I use noscript instead of an ad blocker. I find it blocks the intrusive ads. I do not mind what I view as normal ads (ie: text or link), but these video and popup ads drive me crazy. I find noscript blocks the "bad" ads.
I install Firefox and uBlock on friends/family devices as often as I can.
In case your assumption here is that TFA is about Edge disabling adblockers: it's not. It's just removing ManifestV2 support. ManifestV3 is still supported. Despite what one might assume, MV3 does not seem to measurably diminish the effectiveness of adblockers; if anything, it improves it. (Source: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0027.php)
The only reason anyone knows about the switch between manifest 2 and 3 is that the only meaningful difference is the crippled ad blocking ability. Nobody knows any other difference unless they are an extension developers or worked on making the Internet a worse place.
Isn't the main issue that for MV3 you can't have a dynamic blocklist ? And so you have to update it with an extension update ?
There is a dynamic API too that allows extensions to modify the blocklist at runtime.
I’ve been using UBlock Origin Lite on my iPhone for a while, and that works great, keeping itself updated from EasyList and allowing for custom rules.
In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.
>In some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse. Sometimes you have to flip it into “complete mode” (and give it full access to modify the current site) to get good blocking.
I don't how this is supposed to be a demerit given that the v2 version had full access to every site you visit. Safari just made that more explicit.
I use MV3 AdGuard and it blocks ads for me. I don't get the fuss about MV2 deprecation.. sure, MV3 is limited compared to firefox, but it's not like MV2 was that much better, no version ever supported rewriting request response.
MV3 DNR redirect is notably lame though, instead of replacing the response it generates a real redirect which breaks for example replacing the service worker response. But could MV2 webRequestBlocking replace the response? Well of course not.
Rules are limited (in syntax and number) and you can only ship updated rules with updated extensions (at least you can skip the queue if you only update rulesets but it's VERY annoying to do). It's also missing a bunch of features: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... (I see here that replacing response body is possible with Firefox only, is that your use-case?). MV2 was miles better.
Basically every chromium based browser.
Brave as well?
Brave's adblock isn't as powerful as ublock.
In what sense? As a normie-tier user of Brave’s internal and blocker, it’s worked great. I never became a power-user of uBlock.
Not saying this is it, but I never managed to block YouTube shorts with brave adblocker (in mobile), where I can do it with ublock. If you can do it, please explain, I promise I will try asap (I really dislike ff mobile UI).
On mobile (similar on Desktop), just go to Setting -> Shields and Privacy -> Content Filters.
In there are a bunch of Youtube related blockers (including Shorts), that I find work really well. Mobile Brave also lets you lock/screen off your phone while a YT video continues playing, which is a killer feature for listening to podcasts.
I found myself becoming addicted to YT Shorts, and Brave's filters totally solved my problem.
+1, works well enough
It doesn't have to be so long as it still supports the above.
Brave said they’ll keep some select MV2 extensions, though that remains to be seen. Especially if it causes too much maintenance headache with upstream chromium. Also it seems that Brave now distributes these select MV2 extensions. So I’m not sure if they have forked them, or if they just repackage upstream.
I believe their adblock is built in to the browser and not an extension, so it can be more effective than the limited extensions.
Brave has its own downsides too, but at least the browser seems pretty effective at blocking ads and tracking junk.
I guess it still will be the best browser to download Firefox
Lets hope it stays that way :)
But if offered enough $, I fear it will join that no-bocker bandwagon.
It always was.
It's ending manifest V2, not just adblockers.
uBlock Origin lite is V3 and is still supported
Inferior alternative
I've used uBlock Origin Lite and have had no issues with blocking ads. The only downside I've seen is that I can't do "Block Elements" to hide non-ad annoying parts of sites.
Serious question: which sites have you encountered where ublock lite doesn't do the job? Even tricky sites (eg. youtube) are defeated with scriptlets, not by intercepting network responses.
I don’t have any data on that because chromium derivatives aren’t installed, haha. It’s not a matter of “does it work”. It’s philosophical.
Advertising companies shouldn’t be in the browser business. It’s a really bad conflict of interest. Chromium is a mistake.
Firefox is pretty great. But IMO they have some poor ux defaults that make it unappealing to random people who simply want a browser.
Chromium being open source is not a mistake. Letting google be the sole driver and not forking it has been. People who want control over their browsers have options. It's a fight because most people don't care about these things.
There is no “browser business,” because people are - with rare exceptions - unwilling to pay for a web browser. Even Firefox is ad-supported indirectly via its default search contract with google.
Right. For example, Firefox Mobile doesn't support hitting ctrl+T to open a new tab, completely breaking flow for anyone on a tablet with a keyboard or their phone docked to a monitor.