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9mo ago

Mozilla Has Been Suspiciously Silent About Google And Manifest V3

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9mo ago

Mozilla's Been Suspiciously Silent About Chrome's adblock crackdown: If they can’t increase the number of their users due to financing (Google), then their financing has to change as soon as possible

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57 comments

Mozilla is the maker of the famous Firefox browser which has been using its own web engine called “Gecko” since forever, and hence, is not affected at all by these moves from Google.
You answered your own question. It doesn't effect FF.
But, I do agree they should use the downgrade in functionality of V3 as a point for advertising FF.
- What good would advertising "Still supporting Manifest V2" do for your average user? They also wouldn't want to openly advertise that "Your ad block still works with us".
  
  Most sane take in this whole thread.
  Some of y'all get a little conspiratorial.
  
  That is literally the premise of the article
- Don't they get like 90% of their money from Google?
  
  Yes.
- Didn't they remove XUL extensions to make their extension interface compatible with inferior chrome web extensions?
  
  I just did a quick online search and it seems like the reason for removing that was that it was way too much work to maintain and stopped them from implementing performance improvements for Firefox. Apparently it was also a lot of work for extension developers, since they had to update their extensions constantly.
  That's just what I read tho, I wasn't there when XUL extensions where still a thing.
  
  Yes, after twenty years of refusing to stabilize any part of that interface.
  Chrome is absolutely the villain in this context. But Mozilla has been fucking itself over since the single-digit version numbers.
  
  i wouldn’t say inferior… mozilla extensions were more performant and flexible, web extensions (ie the initial chrome format - now a standard that most browsers use) are easier to develop, and thus there were a lot more of them
- affect

Mozilla is silent about Firefox in general, not just about Manifest v2 and v3. I assume there is nothing new to report. Mozilla already stated somewhere they will support V2 and the extensions will work as before. But I don't understand why Mozilla does not use this moment from marketing standpoint to market the Firefox Extension Manifest V2 the hell out of it.
- Why piss off the guy who pays your bills bro
  
  Don't they need to pay the bills if they don't want to get in antitrust investigations?
  
  That check is going to run out sooner, rather than later
- Because they are an organizational mess.
- mozilla the organization has acted extremely reluctant, almost embarrassed, to talk about the browser.

Because it doesn't make sense for all Firefox marketing material to be how shit chrome is. Save that bullshit for American president elections
- It will be exciting to see Kamala and Trump debate whether Gecko or Blink should be the industry leader.
  
  Kinda off topic, but I find it weird that Kamala is usually referred by first name, and trump by surname.
  
  Would it... though?
  
  Harris can't deny the popularity of Blink. Trump is a die-hard EdgeHTML advocate.
- Not saying anything bad about chrome is probably in the contract they have with Google which is most of their income
  
  Nah I doubt, it would be a huge lawsuit if google was found to pay competitors for staying quiet about their flaws
- Hold up
  American presidents are hating on Chrome? What did I miss?

... because Mozilla already clarified their position on this last year.
TL;DR
No, Mozilla is NOT ditching manifest v2.
Well what’s happening with MV2 you ask? Great question – in case you missed it, Google announced late last year their plans to resume their MV2 deprecation schedule. Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.
Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
- Did you read the article? Your link supports the point it was making: Mozilla doesn't mention ad blocking anywhere. It's immediately brought up in the comments, but Mozilla itself doesn't want to broach the topic.
  Years ago, Mozilla would explicitly call ad blocking a privacy feature, and proclaim it explicitly.
  Now they don't.
  
  ~~but Mozilla itself doesn’t want to broach the topic.~~
  Again, a reminder that Mozilla plans to continue support for the Manifest Version 2 blocking WebRequest API (this API powers, for example, uBlock Origin) while simultaneously supporting Manifest Version 3.
  Source: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2022/12/02/webextensions-mv3-webmidi-opensearch-pip-updates-and-more-these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-128/
  ~~Years ago, Mozilla would explicitly call ad blocking a privacy feature, and proclaim it explicitly.~~
  Ahem! https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/ > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/adblocker/
  Cooking up conspiracy theory instead of research is easy, is not it?

Manifest v3 extensions work in Firefox, too. Its just the new thing. Its way easier to build cross-browser extensions with, too. V3 is actually a good thing overall, as its led to a lot of extensions being available for Firefox when the devs might have just targeted chrome. Way more feature parity between browsers with v3.
Chrome dropping support for v2 doesn't merit a response from Firefox because nothing changes for Firefox users and they're not going to drop support. Any one who actually cares (and they should) will move to Firefox on their own, so why waste advertising money on that? Eventually Firefox and any other browsers who want to allow stuff like ublock will probably have a way to do the same tasks in v3 (and the Firefox Dev team has said as much in blog posts for ages), then it'll just be a feature that doesn't work in chrome. V3 just simply doesn't have the API that ublock uses in v2.
There have been discussions for years in the w3c standards group about this whole shitshow and this is one the chrome team have basically refused to budge on despite all the other browser teams. Its honestlu a mirscle they delayed it as long as they have. This was originally supposed to happen at the start of 2023.
Chrome is kinda like a country with a overrule veto vote at the UN when it comes to w3c working groups since they can just do whatever they want anyway, and nothing will change until they no longer have that power. That said, browser feature parity is at an all time high recently and its because all the browser teams are working together better than ever. There are just these hard limits chrome chooses to stick to.

"We really can't rock the boat on this Google money "

Biggest thing I learned from that article is that over 1/3 of users use an adblocker. I did not know adblockers had become so prevalent amongst normies
- Have you visited a website without it, its 10:1 ratio of ads to content
  
  Oh yeah I would never browse the internet unprotected by an adblocker, but knowing that normies are feeling this way now too? That's something else entirely

Mozilla should spent money to advertise(Is this right? I don't know verbs fuck) a flaw in Chrome? It's not like the public cares about it.
- No, not a flaw in chrome, it has always had flaws even regarding what security oriented extensions like uBO could do.
  Not a flaw in chrome, but that the tools they depended on still work over here.
- The do get most of there funding from Google

There are thousands of user configurable flags/settings in about:config
An option for Manifest V3 has been there for quite a while. It wasn't enabled by default.
In FF Nightly for Android it is enabled by default along with V2.

Why would it not be?

Well of course they are, after all they are slowly becoming one of these malicious companies it tried to fight with.

57 comments