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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
You can easily remove those features from the free version by right clicking on the extensions and then disabling them, or adding a config file to disable them on startup.
I happily paid for the paid version. Have been using Brave and Brave search for years, glad to have my money to to support the browser, unlike donations to Mozilla which go to supporting their idiotic "them/them non-binary" new mascot I stead of actually focusing on the browser.
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.
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?
We can be non-absolute about this, providers like Brave and Carbon have shown that it can be done with reason. Of course it’s still something of an intrusion… but we haven’t modelled tech in better ways.
Either we help build new ways to do this, or we have to accept that some advertising has always driven media/knowing about the new blacksmith/the internet/whatever.
I’m gonna get downvoted to hell — and I use uBlock Origin almost all the time with strict filters —, but I’m getting old and thinking that idealism hasn’t been working, maybe if we’re all reasonable we might just get some stuff improved. Dunno.
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):
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?
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.
My fix for this is really a bad idea: I'm on Ubuntu and I just pinned the Google Chrome version before they deprecated the API
If a huge security bug is found, I might need to update
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.
I'm not aware of a 'boycott sites that advertise' list, but possibly that exists – it wouldn't be added to a 'normal' ad blocking list though no, because they'd prioritise a functional site.
If the site is low volume then you’re probably right. But if I wanted to add the domain to my own list manually I couldn’t since it would break the site.
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.
Once the end-user fail-safe of "use a real heuristic ad blocker that's hard to get around" is gone...the incentive for ad platforms to get around the relatively easy hostname based blockers goes WAY up. They know it won't drive people to more sophisticated ad blocker if the technical barriers for those are high.
Google's playbook of slowly eeking out this stuff so that you don't notice you're in the boiling pot has played out several times.
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.
I don't think this follows the way you imagine it does. There's nothing stopping me from serving arbitrary third-party code directly from my own domain. If blocking ad domains becomes commonplace, they will just proxy it through first-party domains.
The only way out of this nightmare is legislation: stiff penalties for intrusive adtech and breaking up large tech monopolies so google isn't both seller and auctioneer.
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
My favorite browser by far, especially since Mozilla/Firefox pissed me off one time too many.
Keep up the good work!
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.
uBlock Origin Lite is still working and will continue working (since this is a MV3 issue). It's worse than the original version, but it works.
(I use Firefox, but I've read your post before the linked post and I thought ublock Origin is the one being killed)
As far as I'm concerned, this means "Google is finally killing [...] Chrome for good". The web is intolerable without adblocking.
Most people don't use adblockers, and if they do it's Adblock Plus or something that saw an ad for
What else can we expect from a browser made by an advertising company?
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the reasons I'm back to Firefox as daily driver. On mobile too.
Same for me!
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".
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.
> ripped all the MV2 code out of chromium
The thing is this code is just scaffolding. You cant rip out actual functionality because its needed by other parts of the browser.
https://derineryilmaz.com/blog/web-request-blocking/
Ai will help here, I maintain several forks for software I use to add a feature or two
Just use Brave. For me internet is unusable without it.
I'd also recommend LibreWolf, for those who want a "strict by default" experience and tweak from there.
I came across this about Brave. Am not sure if the free version is also changing as a result of this move.
Brave is charging $60 for a version of its browser that removes the features you probably never wanted
https://www.techspot.com/news/112671-brave-charging-60-versi...
You can easily remove those features from the free version by right clicking on the extensions and then disabling them, or adding a config file to disable them on startup.
I happily paid for the paid version. Have been using Brave and Brave search for years, glad to have my money to to support the browser, unlike donations to Mozilla which go to supporting their idiotic "them/them non-binary" new mascot I stead of actually focusing on the browser.
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.
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?
We can be non-absolute about this, providers like Brave and Carbon have shown that it can be done with reason. Of course it’s still something of an intrusion… but we haven’t modelled tech in better ways.
Either we help build new ways to do this, or we have to accept that some advertising has always driven media/knowing about the new blacksmith/the internet/whatever.
I’m gonna get downvoted to hell — and I use uBlock Origin almost all the time with strict filters —, but I’m getting old and thinking that idealism hasn’t been working, maybe if we’re all reasonable we might just get some stuff improved. Dunno.
Try Orion
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/...
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.
Related: "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970 10-jun-2026 423 comments
My fix for this is really a bad idea: I'm on Ubuntu and I just pinned the Google Chrome version before they deprecated the API If a huge security bug is found, I might need to update
Yeah, I think you're right. It's not worth it. I'll update chrome and just setup pihole
It is a bad idea. There's RCE CVEs on an almost weekly basis.
I block ads at the OS DNS level.
No browser can load these ads.
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?
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.
Your site probably wouldn't get added to a block list though right ? For DNS based blocking I mean
I'm not aware of a 'boycott sites that advertise' list, but possibly that exists – it wouldn't be added to a 'normal' ad blocking list though no, because they'd prioritise a functional site.
If the site is low volume then you’re probably right. But if I wanted to add the domain to my own list manually I couldn’t since it would break the site.
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.
Once the end-user fail-safe of "use a real heuristic ad blocker that's hard to get around" is gone...the incentive for ad platforms to get around the relatively easy hostname based blockers goes WAY up. They know it won't drive people to more sophisticated ad blocker if the technical barriers for those are high.
Google's playbook of slowly eeking out this stuff so that you don't notice you're in the boiling pot has played out several times.
Except the ads served on the same domain as the sites you want to visit.
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.
I don't think this follows the way you imagine it does. There's nothing stopping me from serving arbitrary third-party code directly from my own domain. If blocking ad domains becomes commonplace, they will just proxy it through first-party domains.
The only way out of this nightmare is legislation: stiff penalties for intrusive adtech and breaking up large tech monopolies so google isn't both seller and auctioneer.
Didn't they do this years ago? What happened to that?
You could still enable it with workarounds like an enterprise policy and loading them manually. They are now removing every bit of it.
I'm using uBlock lite. Works fine.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970
Not the same original link, but same topic.
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