Google is finally killing uBlock Origin in Chrome for good

ddoener about 4 hours ago 30 commentsRead Article on protonprivacy.substack.com

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Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

_345•about 2 hours ago

I moved to Firefox as soon as they began threatening uBlock Origin support and people started switching to Lite, I find it silly that people were tweaking their registries just to stay on a sinking ship for a few more months lol.

MrAlex94•about 2 hours ago

Developer of Waterfox here - if anyone is looking for other options just know Waterfox will carry on allowing extensions to access the browsers own privileged JavaScript APIs, not just MV2 or MV3 APIs - so you’re free to do whatever you like within the browser

0xblinq•about 2 hours ago

Just use Brave. For me internet is unusable without it.

rickstanley•about 1 hour ago

I'd also recommend LibreWolf, for those who want a "strict by default" experience and tweak from there.

kgwxd•29 minutes ago

Of all the browsers, Brave has to be the sleaziest one there is. Don't fall into their trap, you will become their target as soon as they feel they've milked the "we're not Google" strat as much as they can. Privacy/security features should ALWAYS be extensions, managed by someone without gigantic conflicts of interests. You don't want it built in. Opera might technically be worse, but I don't see tech people pushing that one so much.

benabbott•7 minutes ago

i use brave on my iPhone because of the adblock, but i'm not loyal by any means.

i definitely felt the sleaze due to the fact that they sell ad space on new tabs. (_we_ can run ads). any recommendations for alternative ad-blocking mobile (iOS) browsers?

zipityzi•about 4 hours ago

It mentions Edge is also losing MV2: is it? Any source after the 2024 Neowin article that an Edge Canary build 16 months ago disabled UBO?

No issues with UBO on Edge 149 (stable) and it's still available on the Edge Add-ons (it was featured by Microsoft, funnily enough, a few months back):

https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/ublock-ori...

Did I miss something? Microsoft's official statement is that "The Microsoft Edge team is currently in the process of updating this MV3 migration timeline". Now, they've been working on that timeline since at least May 2025, so maybe with Chromium 150 / 151, they'll make it more concrete?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions/...

alyandon•about 4 hours ago

Unless enterprise customers are screaming for MV2 compatibility I would expect Microsoft to make no effort at all to maintain a working MV2 implementation in Edge.

thisislife2•about 4 hours ago

It will be interesting to see how the Chromium clones like Vivaldi and Brave hold up. I know they have stated that they will continue to support MV2 ... but talk is easy. Many of these clones depends on Google search revenues, so it remains to be seen if they "walk the talk".

alyandon•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, once Google has ripped all the MV2 code out of chromium it'll be very interesting to see how long the chromium reskins are able to maintain their private forks.

I also expect Google to be a bad actor and do everything in its power to pointlessly refactor the chromium codebase specifically to make keeping MV2 alive as painful as possible.

verdverm•about 2 hours ago

Ai will help here, I maintain several forks for software I use to add a feature or two

onemoresoop•about 4 hours ago

What else can we expect from a browser made by an advertising company?

xpct•about 4 hours ago

Google likely saw this path way back in 2008 when it started Chromium. Unfortunately, as an ad company, they also have more resources to create a good browser, and to also entrench themselves.

tyingq•about 2 hours ago

Much, much, earlier if you squint a little. 1998.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"

-> "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives"

-> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."

Not browser specific, but they understood the problem well.

xpct•about 1 hour ago

Thank you for sharing this. I imagine at first it wasn't clear that the browser will become our primary interface with the web. Microsoft hoped it would be the OS itself with Windows 98, if I'm not mistaken.

joe_mamba•about 1 hour ago

Weird how no anti-monopoly regulator in the world went after Google for monopolizing the browse market and forcing their own standards in order to fine them and force them to backtrack on these moves.

They threw the book at Microsoft for the Windows and Office monopoly of the 90s and 2000s, but in comparison did absolutely nothing to Google over their search and browser monopoly of the 2010s -today, especially given how influential and important the web is today compared to desktop operating systems which just became launchers for the web browser.

anoyomoose•about 3 hours ago

One of the reasons I'm back to Firefox as daily driver. On mobile too.

giloux314•about 2 hours ago

Same for me!

HelloUsername•about 3 hours ago

Related: "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 10-jun-2026 423 comments

Shorel•about 3 hours ago

I block ads at the OS DNS level.

No browser can load these ads.

goodmythical•about 3 hours ago

I've always wondered about all of the other stuff, though.

I've considered doing the pi-hole thing for family, but doesn't ublock etc do a lot of fixing to make sure pages aren't broken when ads are missing?

Or does pi-hole/your implementation do the same?

OJFord•about 3 hours ago

Yes, uBlock can and does do more than DNS blocking.

Consider the simplest possible case: I run ojford.com and take money from Acme Inc in exchange for displaying their advert. They send me acme-banner.jpg, and I serve it at /static/current-ad.jpg with an <img id="banner-ad" src="/static/current-ad.jpg"> in my header or whatever.

A DNS block covering the ad would block my whole site. Effective, but useless. (Unless you actually intend to boycott anyone who advertises.)

uBlock however can block the #banner-ad element. (Whether community-curated or by you specifying it yourself.)

More realistically this might be say YouTube or googleusercontent subdomains that serve both ads and 'real' content.

Melatonic•about 2 hours ago

Your site probably wouldn't get added to a block list though right ? For DNS based blocking I mean

philipov•about 2 hours ago

yeah, the useful thing about ublock isn't just that it stops ads from loading, but that it lets you remove unwanted divs. There are lots of unwanted divs that have nothing to do with ads, such as removing annoying Use Our AI buttons, or the Shorts section of youtube.

ForHackernews•about 2 hours ago

Except the ads served on the same domain as the sites you want to visit.

kgwxd•24 minutes ago

The third-party part of it is the major security risk. If you just want hide elements on a page, there's simpler tools just for that. If you want to protect yourself, and maybe discourage the rest of the world from thinking it's fine to include arbitrary third-party code in their products, use something better.

inigyou•about 3 hours ago

Didn't they do this years ago? What happened to that?

sunaookami•about 3 hours ago

You could still enable it with workarounds like an enterprise policy and loading them manually. They are now removing every bit of it.

ChrisArchitect•about 3 hours ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970