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Comment by Legend2440

16 days ago

Bad headline. Popular ad blockers have already switched to MV3, and MV2 has already been disabled for all users.

33 comments

Legend2440

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Havoc  16 days ago

The headline is correct. The popular ones like uBO are 100% dead on Chrome thanks to googles coercion.

They didn't just "switch". They had to fundamentally change how they block ads and the new version the adtech company forced upon everyone...drumroll...is less effective at blocking ads. What a coincidence!

Per uBlock:

>uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage because many filters can't be converted into DNR rules

_flux  16 days ago

I was under the impression MV3 is stricly less capable in terms of blocking ability than MV2?

  • maxloh  16 days ago

    Yeah. MV3 is a faster but less capable version.

    With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.

    There is a limit on how large the list can be, depending on the browser.

    • jdiff  16 days ago

      JavaScript really isn't that slow. JIT compilation can wind up faster than AOT compilation. And much of the APIs called by JavaScript is natively-implemented browser code. JavaScript is faster than C# yet people implement games in C# (not the engine cores, but that's a very similar situation to JS) and don't bat an eye.

      3 replies →

  • notatoad  16 days ago

    that is theoretically true. but i switched to the v3-compatible ublock origin lite a year ago and i've noticed essentially no difference in the performance. all the ads are blocked, just like they were with the v2-compatible adblocker.

nicce  16 days ago

Most would not consider MV3 versions as ”adblockers” anymore.

  • tartoran  16 days ago

    Do they block ads though? I am now only using Firefox because I can install Ublock origin and that works out for me.

    • zdragnar  16 days ago

      uBO lite blocks between most and all of the ads, at least on the sites I browse. I honestly didn't notice a difference switching over.

      I'm actually more curious to hear what sites it doesn't do a good job on.

    • dunham  16 days ago

      ublock origin lite is blocking a bunch of stuff for me, and things are unbearable when I turn it off.

      For many sites, especially news sites, I toggle javascript off. It's reasonably easy to do per site in chrome (click left of location bar and "site settings"). I don't know if there is an easy way to do this per site in firefox.

      So far I've stuck with chrome for a few reasons:

      - Mozilla doesn't implement desktop PWA and has cancelled the project. I use this. - Mozilla was using about twice as much memory as chrome. (I need to revisit this, Chrome seems to have gotten fatter.) - Safari is a royal pain to write your own extensions (last I checked you need to create an application and bundle the extension into it). - I like the multiple profiles in Chrome to sandbox things like my google login. There may be a firefox equivalent, however.

  • spankalee  16 days ago

    Yeah, I think calling the Mv3 versions "secure adblockers" would be more accurate.