The “Manifest V3” rollout is back after letting tensions cool for a year.
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A year later, Google is restarting the phase-out schedule, and while it has changed some things, Chrome will eventually be home to inferior filtering extensions.
Google’s blog post says the plan to kill Manifest V2, the current format for Chrome extensions, is back on starting June 2024.
The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time.
On the high end now for me, Slack is drinking 500MB, while a single Google Chat tab, created by this company that is so concerned about performance, is at 1.5GB of memory usage.
Google is adding a completely arbitrary limit on how many “rules” content filtering add-ons can include, which are needed to keep up with the nearly infinite ad-serving sites that are out there (by the way, Ars Technica subscriptions give you an ad-free reading experience and make a great holiday gift!).
Mozilla’s blog post on the subject promises “Firefox’s implementation of Manifest V3 ensures users can access the most effective privacy tools available like uBlock Origin and other content-blocking and privacy-preserving extensions.”
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Google’s sales pitch for Manifest V3 is that, by limiting extensions, the browser can be lighter on resources, and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers.
Emphases mine. Funny, I use extensions to protect my privacy from Google.
Chromium needs to be fully divested from Google. End of story. There’s too much conflict of interest in letting the world’s largest advertising company have this much control over one of the two major browsers. If you don’t see the problem with that, imagine if Taco Bell was also the world’s largest producer of anti-diarrhea medicine.
As a web developer, Safari needs to either die in a fire or be transferred to a company that actually cares. It’s more than half a decade behind everybody else.
Tell me about it. Every time I implement some new thing in my app:
Firefox/Chrome: You cast HTML5 video. Critical hit!
Safari: Your spell fizzles…
Yeah, when testing my sites, on the desktop at least, I don’t even bother testing in Safari. It ends up with nothing but headaches and a bunch of kludges to make things work there. Reminds me of working with IE years ago. But at least with desktop Safari, it has such a small market share that ignoring it isn’t problematic.
Why would it be? Maybe if you looked at market share just for mobile devices. But on desktop it’s limited to just macOS.
You have a choice A. Be a Chad who Dumps Chrome and chromium based browsers . or B. remain a whiny loser who has to deal with ads.
Even without all this ad blocker bs from Google, I like Firefox a lot better than the chrome based browser I used before, opera.
It’s a lot cleaner and feels faster
Doesn’t really matter at this point, I have already uninstalled chrome on all devices at home and work. I guess Google can still try to slow down other browsers on YouTube and other Google services though.
Trust me when I say this - they will keep pushing until their services are no longer usable at all on anything other than chrome. And they will find enough money to keep the antitrust regulators quiet. Meanwhile a big chunk of those who switched away from chrome will return to it - because principles are not bigger than convenience. Meanwhile, those with enough constitution to stay put will find themselves excluded from a large part of the web - a digital pariah, if you will.
Yeah I don’t doubt at all that Google will try. I’m a bit more optimistic than you that we will continue to have ways to get around their bullshit though.
