Hey all, I was about to setup uBlock Origin in chromium, when I saw the notice that it may soon be ended due to not following best practices, etc. I looked this up and some articles and posts state that Chrome is discontinuing content blockers / ad blockers soon. Will this apply to the chromium app in Linux?

Other than for testing purposes, my usage of Chromium is for the ability to make some sites into webApps. I just like some to be isolated with their own window and icon. The standard response I see to pretty much anyone is that they should switch to Firefox and stop wanting the webApp. I saw some comments that Firefox does not and will not implement webApps due to some security issues (?? not sure why). I don’t understand how it is difficult just make a standalone window with a custom icon choice. I see no reason that has to compromise anything at all, but I am not a developer.

I’m getting off-track here. So, is Chromium going to go the way Google wants it to go for Chrome? It was my understanding that Chromium is kind of an offshoot and not just up to Google in terms of its course. Will we be able to use extensions that Google doesn’t want, and have to get them from a new repository instead of the chrome web store?

Any insight on this would be appreciated, thanks.

  • @leopold
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    16 days ago

    MV3 doesn’t make adblockers impossible, only less effective. It’s important to note that MV3 has changed a fair bit since the initial controversy and isn’t quite as limiting as it used to be. The fact that adblockers will lose some functionality at all is still a dealbreaker for me and many others which I thankfully won’t have to deal with as a Firefox user, but it isn’t going to kill adblockers on Chrome and most users will probably just install an MV3-compatible adblocker and move on with their day.

    uBlock Origin’s developers don’t seem to want to make a proper MV3 port, which is fair because they’d probably have to rewrite most of the extension, but they did create the far more minimal uBlock Orgin Lite, which a lot of people have taken to be an attempt at porting uBlock Origin to MV3. It isn’t that. On top of MV3’s limitations, it also makes the decision to work within these self-imposed restrictions:

    • No broad host permissions at install time – extended permissions are granted explicitly by the user on a per-site basis.

    • Entirely declarative for reliability and CPU/memory efficiency.

    These aren’t MV3 limitations, just a thing Gorhill decided to do. See the FAQ. You can get much closer to uBlock Origin within MV3’s constraints than uBlock Origin Lite does. Right now, the best option appears to be AdGuard, which has been making a true best-effort attempt at porting their adblocker to MV3 pretty much since the announcement.

    • @AndrewZabar@lemmy.worldOP
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      1016 days ago

      Hey, the moment it becomes less than the best, I’m out lol. I guess it’s goodbye chromium.

      It’s actually not what I was using; I was using nativefier to make webapp using electron. I guess I’m just gonna ditch all these ideas and just stick to Firefox and that’s it.