Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockers

luetage

@rseiler While I agree in general, we had no lack of adblocking so far. First of all the current state of Vivaldi’s adblocker is not as bad as people make it out to be, and secondly there’s still enough time to make improvements.

Panino

Again, and again and again, I'll never forgive Jón S. von Tetzchner for choosing chorume's engine instead of partnering with Mozilla.

Plenty of times people answered back to me that "Chromium Project is open source and free". Oh yes, open and free to you to fool yourself, and the exact same Google's plaything. Wasn't obvious that Google would use this as tool to control the web for their wishes?

Again, I'll never forgive Jón S. von Tetzchner for choosing chorume's engine instead of partnering with Mozilla.
I don't want to see him doing a blog post lamenting how Google is sabotaging Vivaldi again, or anyone else at Vivaldi Team. You all should expect that this and worse would happen. The team talks and defends a free and secure web for the users but sided with "the enemy" of that same web helping it expand it's power instead of allying with with others that shared the same ideals.

nikkehtine

@julien_picalausa: Would it be possible to work with other Chromium browser vendors (Brave, Ungoogled Chromium, Bromite, Kiwi) to make an alternative extension store, outside of Google's control and even able to install extensions on mobile? For example, VSCodium is a de-Microsoft-ified VS Code, and it comes with its own extension store called Open VSX registry (ran by the Eclipse Foundation), that still contains all the popular VS Code extensions submitted there by their developers and maintainers. I'm sure something like that for web browsers would also be possible, since web browsers are used and maintained by way more people, and having multiple teams work on it as well as the "legacy" APIs should be much faster and easier.

Apocolypto

@panino: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/x92ga3/a_silly_question_why_vivaldi_was_built_on/

LocutusOfBorg

@Preorian said in Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockers:

So, basically this means that we all lose the powerful features that Ublock Origin has at this moment. And that using Vivaldi's own blocker is going to be similar (though I expect less features) as using the possible upcoming "Ublock Origin Lite" that throws away pretty much every powerful Ublock Origin feature. I had hoped that Vivaldi would have done more. I had hopes that Vivaldi fighting against this V3 bs would mean that using the original Ublock Origin would be still possible.

Google. Don't be evil, Eh? That company has way too much power.

Seems that I'll be forcing myself to use internet less and less from now on, I can't go back to ads ADS ads ADS popping up everywhere. Ads are the cancer of internet (and all kinds of JavaScript heavy flashy, unusable web3.0, or whatever the trendy word today is, design mess).

EXACTLY THIS Vivaldi

Stardust

I am ready to test Vivaldi with Gecko engine
Never liked that chromium thing...

TalGarik

it seems quite obvious that the users who will notice how crippled will be their privacy extensions once V3 will kill V2 are users of uBlock Origin and other similar extensions, people liking a granular control of what is going on.
If we look at the download numbers of these extensions - in Chrome, Firefox and Opera's extensions stores - we can notice that these users represent a very small niche, so IMHO the damage to the performance of the extensions brought by V3 is a side effect, it would be ridiculous to think that Google created a complex novelty like V3 to bother 20 millions users (at best)
At the same time that same niche of users - which for Chrome is a drop of water in an ocean - is vital for small companies like Vivaldi.
I guess Vivaldi needs to elevate the level of its internal ad-blocker to uBO levels, this is the only way not to lose users to Firefox.
Frankly I do not know what I will do myself, there are two browsers having features that I consider essential and both of them are chromium based browsers and Firefox cannot match those features.
Alas all of this was sadly predictable: who owns the engine owns the browser.

Cqoicebordel

@Hadden89 Yeah, I agree, it won't be easy.
But if keeping the code side by side might be possible, given that the Manifest mention which version is used. Branching here for old or new code could be easy.
I'm not optimistic, it's a big beast, and without a store, it might be moot, but in any case, it could be worth exploring it. And so, I was wondering if Vivaldi would explore that possibility too.

zakius

@Catweazle ABP filters are not as flexible as we'd like, there's no GUI to create more complex filters and rules and it most likely can't uncloak CNAME so we still need improvements

zakius

@Catweazle it's the worst engine for the simple reason: what is worth document renderer that can't even render sharp text and ends up with a blurry mess instead?

zakius

@n8chavez external blocker would need to either block by hostnames or perform MITM that would stop some sites from loading at all due to certificate mismatch, that's not a viable solution

zakius

@barbudo2005 there's no point in keeping support for the crippled Chromium variant of uBO, it's underpowered anyway so all the resources should be used to build a blocker that has WE uBO feature parity instead

zakius

@Apocolypto with Firefox they had most of features done OOTB, with Chromium we still can't get toolbar config, extensions are EVEN MORE limited than in Quantum, text is blurry... that's not a feasible option, unfortunately it's too late to switch now

christiehmalry

@zakius: I haven't seen an ad in as long as I can remember, not one, ublock may have limits on chrome but for its basic purpose, blocking advertisements it isn't just good it's infallible, you see no ads, at all, ever, what more do you want?

danielson

@julien_picalausa: - have always used uBlock Origin. Vivaldi's adblock just is not as good.

zakius

@christiehmalry better efficiency and being less reliant on lists and more on general rules, being able to detect cloaked domains makes a difference

Aijo

If Firefox is keeping adblockers functional, would it make long term sense to base a version of Vivaldi under their engine, rather than Chrome's?

Catweazle

@Aijo , no, see comments above. Change Vivaldi to Gecko would mean throwing away 7 years of development, because this required developing Vivaldi again from scratch. With a small company like Vivaldi it would be the end.

julien_picalausa

@cqoicebordel: Probably not all of it. If it was just the API itself, it wouldn't be an issue, but there is underlying code and architecture that need to remain in place to allow keeping the API around. I suspect somethings will be rearchitectured in chromium once Manifest V2 is gone and then those parts of the API will be unmaintainable. webRequest just happens to be in a position where it doesn't look like the underlying architecture is likely to change.

TalGarik

@julien_picalausa a question: Firefox users already experience websites not working or not working the proper way because they are optimized for chromium only, with FF "saving" V2 estensions this situation is not going to worsen? thanks