Most people still haven’t heard of Manifest V3, so if you are one of those not using Firefox, this is for you.
If you’ve been on YouTube or Reddit August last year, you might’ve seen this screen yourself, or a screenshot of someone else getting it. This of course, I am talking about the infamous YouTube ad blocker blocker popup, discussion exploded on Reddit mostly consisting of people complaining about ads, as well as an angry mob storming r/memes, turning it into a Firefox propaganda centre.
About a month later, different adblockrs eventually found their way of bypassing detection, and they work on YouTube again. So natrually Redditors thought they’ve won another war against big tech, completely ignoring Google’s original plan to kill off adblockers by June this year.
So all extensions, including adblockers follows a specification called the Manifest V2. The Manifest allows extensions to do certain things, say accessing browser tabs or to change browser settings. All while putting some limitations, and prevent extensions from doing crazy stuff like installing a virus to your system. But too much limitation, is what pisses off many extension developers about the upcoming ManifestV3.
In this article written by the EFF, they interviewed developers responsible for popular extensions, where most described ManifestV3 as a downgrade, with some accused it for being purposefully bad. I particularly like this one from the creator of SingleFile, “I consider the migration to Manifest V3 to be a major regression from a functional and technical point of view.”
After an update in June this year, a feature called the WebRequest API will be removed, and the adblockers and tracker blockers that depend on this feature will stop working. Since the business model of Google is to track your online activity and then show you personalised ads, it is not difficult to see why this feature is removed.
Not only are they sacrifising user experience for monetary gain, they are forcing the same update on all Chromium browsers as well. I am hereby devastated to inform you that this is not the first time they have done it, and it will not be the last time they will do it.
But there are also good news, non-Chromium browsers will not be affected by the Manifest V3, and if you are already using one, you will be exempt from any future nonsense Google throws in your way. So if you are considering switching to one, unless Safari is your goto browser, which lacks competent extensions support, you can still get your adblockers, another adblockers, all the adblockers.
So are you going to make the switch before the update? Let me know in the comments down below, anyways I will be seeing you in two weeks, have a good one.
An article for more my ranting needs https://gmtex.siri.sh/fs/1/School/Y12/Cssoc/chromium.html
AFAIK they’re still around. I switched off of Google for searches because of them.
I’m still using google search, just deactivated amp. Initially with a Firefox add-on, now I think that’s a native feature.
But Google search results are increasingly bad, what alternative do you recommend? I’ve dabbled with bing and yandex (which is honestly quite good, but… Russian) and would like to have a real alternative.
Brave Search has been alright, tho I’m not entirely sure how their algorithms are working & they index much slower so they probably aren’t doing full aggregation themselves nor does it seem that they are just using Bing like DuckDuckGo. Yandex is great for image search & I use their translation service even if it’s a little weaker just to spread my data across services instead of centralizing. Even if I preferred content written by a human, a lot of general queries it seems I am more prone to reaching for an LLM …even tho it could be a hallucination, a lot of the content written by folks on the highest SEO sites are just as much bullshit.
Spend some time finding a few good searxng instances. Also, the language setting affects the results a lot, so make sure to change it based on what you’re searching for. I mostly use “english [en]”, but for local searches I change it to my native language, or to the language of the relevant country.
I tried a bunch of different services without satisfaction until I finally decided to try Kagi. It’s been 6 months and I’m still satisfied with it.
I keep coming across kagi but haven’t used it yet. Think I’ll give it a try finally.
It costs money, but to me it’s a small price to pay for my sanity. My average search volume is about 700 searches per month. That’s 700 times per month that I was getting frustrated, getting bombarded with ads, and being unable to find what I was looking for. Now I don’t have that problem, so my frustration levels have decreased considerably.
Yep I’ve just signed up for the free trial and will use it in parallel to google to get a feeling for the difference. Since I’m using google with anti-tracking and adblock, I don’t really get annoyed by the site itself, more like the crappy top-ranking SEO pages. Back in the days, the front page was all I ever needed, now I feel like the good results start on page 2.
Hopefully it works out for you. FYI, if you’re searching for a question, add a question mark at the end of it and Kagi will put an AI summary answer at the top of the results. In my experience it is very accurate.
Oh nice, that’s a good tip. Thanks!