I know the topic of whether adblock is piracy is debated, but I am guessing there are a lot of adblock users here and I was wondering if anyone has seen the youtube adblock warning message in the wild. I use ublock origin and still haven’t seen it once.
It changes how extensions work in Chrome (and derived browsers), notably it modifies the API that adblockers use to block requests and dramatically restricts the number of rules they can support. It’s a change pretty clearly designed to limit the scope of adblockers and make it easier for companies like Google to work around them.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
Which would mean that Brave and Ungoogled-Chromium won’t work as well anymore
Brave have said they’ll retain support for Manifest v2, but realistically that’s likely to be non-trivial amounts of work, and get harder as their upstream codebase moves away from it and the internals get switched over from the old webRequest mechanism.
They’ll have to patch things manually to keep it working, which is likely to get harder and harder. If Google want to make it hard for them to retain support, they can do so.
At some point they may not have the resources to keep doing that and might have to decide between forking the codebase and losing manifest v2. If they fork then they’ll have a load more work to do in backporting security changes etc.
They’ll also have to find a way to retain the old manifest v2 versions of extensions, as they’ll disappear from the Chrome store. Might mean maintaining a separate store. The authors might not care enough to maintain a Brave version of their extensions.
All in all it’s not great path forward for Brave. At best they’ll have an increased maintenance burden. At worst it gives Google the power to force them to drop Manifest v2 or be overwhelmed by maintenance. But this is what we get for handing an effective monopoly to Google.
Switch to Firefox!
I’d love it if Brave eventually starts building off Firefox just so there’s another browser out there that isn’t built on Chromium.
Which would be pretty funny, since the Brave CEO only started the project, because he got booted off Firefox (Mozilla) for being an asshole.
Good thing I primarily use Librewolf on PC, but I’m using Brave on Mobile. Unfortunately, I believe even Bromite is based on chromium.
Firefox on mobile is likely not going to have all of the privacy features of librewolf. I’m waiting for someone to make the port, I’ll switch ASAP