Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO

My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.

The better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then.

Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.

A problem is that the platform owners argue that this kind of stuff is why they need to put up a security gate that prevents you from installing whatever you want on your own device while also allowing you to install the malware from the ads (... maybe because they want to control what you can install more than they care about the malware?)

> the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.

Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would you parents even notice?

A few days ago, my mother asked me to fix her YouTube because she kept getting something telling her to update. I looked at YouTube on her iPhone and saw an autoplaying video ad that displayed an animated fake system style pop-up button, designed to look like an important iPhone OS security update. The ad even showed an animation of the button appearing on the screen, making it look even more like a real system notification.

This needs to stop.

Evidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time.

Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.

Tangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.

Raspberry pi + adguard + tailscale could be a good solution for you. Browser agnostic, you get an admin dashboard to manage the white/blacklists, see logs of the attempts and other goodies. Bonus, this combination works on mobile too. The only nit I have is that after restarting the phone, tailscale may not auto-start.

> They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it.

You could even extend that to OS as well.

Ad blocking has always been a safety issue.

> My parents are at an age where they fall for things.

If they're falling for things that they didn't used to fall for, that's sounds more like dementia than age.

> If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.

This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.

Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment.

I've been using Firefox since the beginning and will continue using it. I only use Chrome for occasional testing, but close to 100% of the time, everything works in Firefox unless an overzealous add-on breaks a page and then I simply disable it to get going again.

I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.

I've been using Firefox as my main browser since I switched from Windows to Linux.

No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.

They are in a tough place.

They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.

The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.

I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.

I switched to Firefox like 6 months ago. I’m happy with it even though Chromium is a better engine imo. What Google is doing with Chrome is unacceptable.

Firefox is still popular in Germany, at around 10%

I really wish Firefox will catch up on the debug/devtools front. Nonetheless, I use FF as much as I can on both my mobile and desktop devices.

firefox has a setting on ios version that blocks ads so maybe they will get more market share that way?

Try using ladybird as a fit alternative. It will be complete within your lifetime, and maybe even in firefox’s lifetime.

Typing this from Zen browser as we speak, can't suggest it enough.

I used to use firefox a long time ago but got tired of all the memory leaks and lag before I switched to chrome.

Now that mv2 is going away, I switch back to firefox, and it still has memory leak issues after all these years, it is really disappointing.

I know it's more infrastructure, but just use pi-hole and then it doesn't really matter what browser you use, if we're just talking about pop ups and malicious ads.

I think a lot of us would pay them at this point, if they kept seriously working on the browser.

I use it exclusively on Android for the ad block on naughty hot girl sites wink wink.

I use chrome and those sites are miserable.

Firefox is a terrible browser. The engine is alright, and good just because it's not the monoculture. The browser is terrible. When you open it up in a fresh profile, it starts asking you to sign up for things and spend money.

I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book:

Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.

Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:

>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.

I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.

I stopped using Firefox when it had massive performance issues (CPU and memory) to the point it was unusable. Chrome in comparison was lightning fast and since then I somehow cannot get myself to use Firefox though I know they likely have fixed those issues long time ago. I have Firefox installed but never open it.

I also was a Firefox user, but Mozilla killed Firefox many years ago. I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio in order to watch videos (well, hear audio) on youtube. Chrome worked fine. At that moment in time I knew mozilla no longer cared about the users. (I use thorium though, so actually I can still use ublock origin fine. But I am sad that I ended up with the evil Google empire. There is no real competition against it anymore, sadly enough.)

> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.

Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.

I feel like with the advent of vibe coding, the bar to making your own browser is gradually lowering. People are already making all sorts of useful "houseplant programming" to serve their own pain points. Sooner or later, agentic coding will actually become really good and people will be able to just vibe code a whole browser in Rust or something that addresses the exact pain points that power users have.

I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.

Firefox was amazing even when Chrome was released

Yep, Chrome was great but the past few years they're obviously moving the wrong way. I'm completely off of Chrome, back to Firefox and Brave.

Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".

Funny enough I never left Firefox. It’s always been great.

I remember those days. I still used FF even back then. Stability was an occasional issue with FF, but feature-wise Chrome was always better.

I remember when my friends were singing the praises of Chrome and Gmail and I was telling them it's a trap.

Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.

I will keep the same

It was astonishing how you fell for it back then.

In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!

It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837

Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.

When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.

If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...

A - Billions

B - not Billions

The webRequest extension API -- the one that uBlock Origin uses and was removed in Manifest v3 -- was not added until 2012.

All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there.

It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.

Firefox is genuinely quite a good option. There are some Google-driven web proposals that they've refused to implement[0] (I'm sure I disagreed with some of them, though I forget which), but overall I've found that I've never really had to think about the browser: it's just a medium for the web.

They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].

As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.

[0]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [1]: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chrome...

I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.

Yeah I don’t seem to feel any performance or functionality degradation myself. What <X> ad blocking related feature has been made impossible with MV3?

Can't wait until we are forced to actually make Linux Phone systems actually good, but no one will invest until Android is closed

AND try to not use Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Oracle and other similar products made by asshole companies.

This exact issue is why I have been paying for my e-mails for the last 5 years.

And in the case of Brave the ad blocker is built into the browser itself.

Doesnt matter which browser you use, if you don't have proper adblock in it, the pages will load waaaay slower than any other engine.

You don't have to turn off any crypto stuff.

Same here, not using firefox because of worse compatibility (maybe not their fault, many devs only test in chrome) and weaker security (maybe not their fault, they don't have as much money). I appreciate the people who do and help diversify the ecosystem though.

If I remember correctly, ~10 years ago one of Waterfox's main points was 64-bit + Intel compiler with aggressive optimization flags. At that time Firefox was 32-bit only on Windows, at least the stable version. From my experience, it didn't feel faster. Actually, it felt slightly more sluggish, I guess pointers and some data structures become larger, so the browser used more memory and put more pressure on CPU caches. It's probably no longer relevant as all major browsers are 64-bit by default.

Yeah, kind of the same. Out of the other "firefox" clones, Waterfox is my goto.

I like Brave, and I know and respect many of the technical team there. I looked into the various stories about the browser that led to it being unpopular in some key communities, and I really couldn't find anything some misunderstandings, common business practices (which you can legitimately disapprove of), and a wish to register opposition to their connection to cryptocurrency/web3.

I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.

Avoid Brave. It is basically Chromium, with commercial shitware slapped on, and an ad-blocker which performs worse than UBlock Origin on Firefox. Brave Inc. (a for-profit company) is openly hostile to forks and independent builds, and expects you to run and trust their binaries. It also wants to charge you a one-time fee for a build free of crapware, i.e. something you can get for free from Chromium.

I've been using Brave for years and its great. Having JS off by default (i.e. shields) is excellent for security. They provide MV2 versions of AdGuard and uBlock Origin that you can enable directly from the browser settings. Those are also both excellent for security since the main threat is malicious scripts served up by ad networks.

It is nerfed.

Exactly right.

This (whether MV3 blocking is sufficient) is the right question to ask, but also a premature answer.

Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.

https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/gatew...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/google-tag-gateway-for-advertise...

In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.

And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.

Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.

I am a webdev and sometimes I have issues with ungoogled-chromium so I switched to firefox. One time I had to debug a push notification issue and realized ungoogled-chromium simply doesn't support it (but never displayed information about that when registering the service worker). That was years ago, situation might be different now.

You mean OS as in "operating system", not "open source", which made me question how you'd suggest Safari and Edge before I realized what was going on.

I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.

Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?

The UBO on Safari has the same issue as chrome except that it has been that way for several years longer. They brought back the lite form of UBO only recently as, presumably, the developer saw the writing on the wall and mv3 and Safari carry the same limitations.

I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.

As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.

Firefox's extension support is far superior to Safari's, cross-platform support, and I really don't want to use Edge for the same reasons I don't want to use Chrome.

If you use more than one operating system, you can't use the operating system browser if you want sync or the same experience. For example, I use a Windows desktop and a MacBook.

Safari is fantastic for me. Passwords app integration alone is a killer feature.

Okay, so first.

Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.

Second,

God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.

Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help

My number one reason. Safari won’t let me customize the search engine. If I had that I would use safari all day long.

Because for enterprise with Google login you literally can't login with anything else except official Chrome.

I've used Linux exclusively for over 20 years. What is its "OS browser"?

I use Safari for nearly everything and it's my favorite browser. It has some oddities, but I find just as many Chrome and Firefox bugs as I do Safari bugs. I use Firefox on everything else though.

The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.

Is edge Different here? It's also dropping ubo anyway.

I prefer Firefox on mobile for supporting ublock personally and I don't see why I would use a different browser on my desktop.

> Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?

Because Edge sucks, and FF is better than Safari.

I'm still using Arc, I wonder when I'll lose UBO support. That'll be the day I switch back to Firefox.

It is not without its fair share of faults, but I stay on Firefox because of multi account containers

I use multiple OSes. I do not want a different list of extensions and preferences on each machine I am on. Firefox makes it simple and uniform.

"Safari" and "beautiful" in the same sentence?

It's not. It's barely functional, slower than Chrome, and always trails it in feature compatibility.

Safari was always the Internet Explorer 6 of the Internet. Archaic, quirky, way behind on useful new APIs. Perhaps things have changed recently.

> Why not just use Safari?

I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.

Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.

Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.

I'm a dev and use windows (sadly have to), android and linux, and would never use edge, because why? when it randomly opens because of a wrong file association or whatnot, I only see a bucket of ms nags and dark patterns. It's disgusting.

Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.

One data point: I’ve been building Web GIS applications for the past 15ish years and Firefox has one and off been a real pain in the neck, suffering from canvas API quirks and performance issues. I think the current state at work is that Firefox is palpably slower than Chrome and I need to find time to go figure out why.

Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.