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Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

359 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Reminder to switch browsers if you haven't already!

Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If Vivaldi were free and open source, it would make an interesting alternative to Ungoogled Chromium. But it's not, so I'll stick with extensions on Firefox (and Ungoogled Chromium as a backup).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It is source-available though, so that's a plus.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

According to Vivaldi's blog post "Why isn't Vivaldi's browser open-source?", all of Vivaldi's UI is closed source and not source-available:

Note that, of the three layers above, only the UI layer is closed-source. Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, which leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source code.

Keeping Vivaldi’s UI layer closed-source and obfuscated allows us to set these worries aside, so we can focus on the job at hand. It may not be a perfect solution, but as a business, we have to make decisions that minimize uncertainty, if only for our self respect as employees – and employee-owners.

The UI is the main thing that differentiates Vivaldi from Chromium, and Vivaldi chose to keep it closed source and obfuscated for business reasons. That's a negative compared to Firefox and Ungoogled Chromium.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Huh, hadn't seen that bit before, thanks for that. Ok, well that is disappointing. I did notice this bit in there too though:

What about security benefits? Even though most of the security-relevant code for Vivaldi browser is in Chromium, there is also some security-relevant code in the UI. If you think that specific security-relevant parts of the UI should be open-sourced to make Vivaldi more trustworthy, let us know, and we’ll consider putting it out as part of our code bundles, so you can check it for yourselves.

It not much consolation, but it's better than nothing. As it stands though, FF still has too many problems for me. I'll have to see how this ad blocking thing shakes out though, might have to revisit my decision then.